Some Apple Employees Fear Its $3,000 Mixed-Reality Headset Could Flop

An anonymous reader shares this report from AppleInsider:
Apple has allegedly demonstrated its mixed reality headset to its top executives recently, in an attempt to generate excitement for the upcoming platform launch. While executives are keen on the product, others within Apple are not sure it’s a home run hit. Eight anonymous current and former employees told the New York Times that they are skeptical about the headset, despite Apple’s apparent glossy demonstration of the technology.

Manufacturing has already begun for a June release of the $3,000 headset, insiders say in the Times’ article:

Some employees have defected from the project because of their doubts about its potential, three people with knowledge of the moves said. Others have been fired over the lack of progress with some aspects of the headset, including its use of Apple’s Siri voice assistant, one person said.Even leaders at Apple have questioned the product’s prospects. It has been developed at a time when morale has been strained by a wave of departures from the company’s design team, including Mr. Ive, who left Apple in 2019 and stopped advising the company last year….

Because the headset won’t fit over glasses, the company has plans to sell prescription lenses for the displays to people who don’t wear contacts, a person familiar with the plan said. During the device’s development, Apple has focused on making it excel for videoconferencing and spending time with others as avatars in a virtual world. The company has called the device’s signature application “copresence,” a word designed to capture the experience of sharing a real or virtual space with someone in another place. It is akin to what Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, calls the “metaverse….”

But the road to deliver augmented reality has been littered with failures, false starts and disappointments, from Google Glass to Magic Leap and from Microsoft’s HoloLens to Meta’s Quest Pro. Apple is considered a potential savior because of its success combining new hardware and software to create revolutionary devices.
Still, the challenges are daunting.

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IBM Installs World’s First Quantum Computer for Accelerating Healthcare Research

It’s one of America’s best hospitals — a nonprofit “academic medical center” called the Cleveland Clinic. And this week it installed an IBM-managed quantum computer to accelerate healthcare research (according to an announcement from IBM). IBM is calling it “the first quantum computer in the world to be uniquely dedicated to healthcare research.”

The clinic’s CEO said the technology “holds tremendous promise in revolutionizing healthcare and expediting progress toward new cares, cures and solutions for patients.” IBM’s CEO added that “By combining the power of quantum computing, artificial intelligence and other next-generation technologies with Cleveland Clinic’s world-renowned leadership in healthcare and life sciences, we hope to ignite a new era of accelerated discovery.”

em>Inside HPC points out that “IBM Quantum System One” is part of a larger biomedical research program applying high-performance computing, AI, and quantum computing, with IBM and the Cleveland Clinic “collaborating closely on a robust portfolio of projects with these advanced technologies to generate and analyze massive amounts of data to enhance research.”
The Cleveland Clinic-IBM Discovery Accelerator has generated multiple projects that leverage the latest in quantum computing, AI and hybrid cloud to help expedite discoveries in biomedical research. These include:

– Development of quantum computing pipelines to screen and optimize drugs targeted to specific proteins;
– Improvement of a quantum-enhanced prediction model for cardiovascular risk following non-cardiac surgery;
– Application of artificial intelligence to search genome sequencing findings and large drug-target databases to find effective, existing drugs that could help patients with Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

The Discovery Accelerator also serves as the technology foundation for Cleveland Clinic’s Global Center for Pathogen & Human Health Research, part of the Cleveland Innovation District. The center, supported by a $500 million investment from the State of Ohio, Jobs Ohio and Cleveland Clinic, brings together a team focused on studying, preparing and protecting against emerging pathogens and virus-related diseases. Through the Discovery Accelerator, researchers are leveraging advanced computational technology to expedite critical research into treatments and vaccines.

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Google Security Researchers Accuse CentOS of Failing to Backport Kernel Fixes

An anonymous reader quotes Neowin:
Google Project Zero is a security team responsible for discovering security flaws in Google’s own products as well as software developed by other vendors. Following discovery, the issues are privately reported to vendors and they are given 90 days to fix the reported problems before they are disclosed publicly…. Now, the security team has reported several flaws in CentOS’ kernel.

As detailed in the technical document here, Google Project Zero’s security researcher Jann Horn learned that kernel fixes made to stable trees are not backported to many enterprise versions of Linux. To validate this hypothesis, Horn compared the CentOS Stream 9 kernel to the stable linux-5.15.y stable tree…. As expected, it turned out that several kernel fixes have not been made deployed in older, but supported versions of CentOS Stream/RHEL. Horn further noted that for this case, Project Zero is giving a 90-day deadline to release a fix, but in the future, it may allot even stricter deadlines for missing backports….

Red Hat accepted all three bugs reported by Horn and assigned them CVE numbers. However, the company failed to fix these issues in the allotted 90-day timeline, and as such, these vulnerabilities are being made public by Google Project Zero.
Horn is urging better patch scheduling so “an attacker who wants to quickly find a nice memory corruption bug in CentOS/RHEL can’t just find such bugs in the delta between upstream stable and your kernel.”

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The New US-China Proxy War Over Undersea Internet Cables

400 undersea cables carry 95% of the world’s international internet traffic, reports Reuters (citing figures from Washington-based telecommunications research firm TeleGeography).

But now there’s “a growing proxy war between the United States and China over technologies that could determine who achieves economic and military dominance for decades to come.”

In February, American subsea cable company SubCom LLC began laying a $600-million cable to transport data from Asia to Europe, via Africa and the Middle East, at super-fast speeds over 12,000 miles of fiber running along the seafloor. That cable is known as South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 6, or SeaMeWe-6 for short. It will connect a dozen countries as it snakes its way from Singapore to France, crossing three seas and the Indian Ocean on the way. It is slated to be finished in 2025.

It was a project that slipped through China’s fingers….

The Singapore-to-France cable would have been HMN Tech’s biggest such project to date, cementing it as the world’s fastest-rising subsea cable builder, and extending the global reach of the three Chinese telecom firms that had intended to invest in it. But the U.S. government, concerned about the potential for Chinese spying on these sensitive communications cables, ran a successful campaign to flip the contract to SubCom through incentives and pressure on consortium members…. It’s one of at least six private undersea cable deals in the Asia-Pacific region over the past four years where the U.S. government either intervened to keep HMN Tech from winning that business, or forced the rerouting or abandonment of cables that would have directly linked U.S. and Chinese territories….

Justin Sherman, a fellow at the Cyber Statecraft Initiative of the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, told Reuters that undersea cables were “a surveillance gold mine” for the world’s intelligence agencies. “When we talk about U.S.-China tech competition, when we talk about espionage and the capture of data, submarine cables are involved in every aspect of those rising geopolitical tensions,” Sherman said.

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France Bans ‘Recreational Apps’ From Government Staff Phones

France announced Friday it is banning the “recreational” use of TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and other apps on government employees’ phones because of concern about insufficient data security measures. Reuters reports: The French Minister for Transformation and Public Administration, Stanislas Guerini, said in a statement that ”recreational” apps aren’t secure enough to be used in state administrative services and “could present a risk for the protection of data.” The ban will be monitored by France’s cybersecurity agency. The statement did not specify which apps are banned but noted that the decision came after other governments took measures targeting TikTok.

Guerini’s office said in a message to The Associated Press that the ban also will include Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, gaming apps like Candy Crush and dating apps. Exceptions will be allowed. If an official wants to use a banned app for professional purposes, like public communication, they can request permission to do so. Case in point: Guerini posted the announcement of the ban on Twitter.

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Huawei Claims To Have Built Its Own 14nm Chip Design Suite

Huawei has reportedly completed work on electronic design automation (EDA) tools for laying out and making chips down to 14nm process nodes. The Register reports: Chinese media said the platform is one of 78 being developed by the telecoms equipment giant to replace American and European chip design toolkits that have become subject to export controls by the US and others. Huawei’s EDA platform was reportedly revealed by rotating Chairman Xu Zhijun during a meeting in February, and later confirmed by media in China. […] Huawei’s focus on EDA software for 14nm and larger chips reflects the current state of China’s semiconductor industry. State-backed foundry operator SMIC currently possesses the ability to produce 14nm chips at scale, although there have been some reports the company has had success developing a 7nm process node.

Today, the EDA market is largely controlled by three companies: California-based Synopsys and Cadence, as well as Germany’s Siemens. According to the industry watchers at TrendForce, these three companies account for roughly 75 percent of the EDA market. And this poses a problem for Chinese chipmakers and foundries, which have steadily found themselves cut off from these tools. Synopsys and Cadence’s EDA tech is already subject to several of these export controls, which were stiffened by the US Commerce Department last summer to include state-of-the-art gate-all-around (GAA) transistors. This January, the White House also reportedly stopped issuing export licenses to companies supplying the likes of Huawei.

This is particularly troublesome for Huawei, foundry operator SMIC, and memory vendor YMTC to name a few on the US Entity List, a roster of companies Uncle Sam would prefer you not to do business with. It leaves them unable to access recent and latest technologies, at the very least. So the development of a homegrown EDA platform for 14nm chips serves as insurance in case broader access to Western production platforms is cut off entirely.

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Intel Co-Founder/Creator of ‘Moore’s Law’ Gordon Moore Dies at Age 94

Intel announced Friday that Gordon Moore, Intel’s co-founder, has died at the age of 94:

Moore and his longtime colleague Robert Noyce founded Intel in July 1968. Moore initially served as executive vice president until 1975, when he became president. In 1979, Moore was named chairman of the board and chief executive officer, posts he held until 1987, when he gave up the CEO position and continued as chairman. In 1997, Moore became chairman emeritus, stepping down in 2006.

During his lifetime, Moore also dedicated his focus and energy to philanthropy, particularly environmental conservation, science and patient care improvements. Along with his wife of 72 years, he established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has donated more than $5.1 billion to charitable causes since its founding in 2000….

“Though he never aspired to be a household name, Gordon’s vision and his life’s work enabled the phenomenal innovation and technological developments that shape our everyday lives,” said foundation president Harvey Fineberg. “Yet those historic achievements are only part of his legacy. His and Betty’s generosity as philanthropists will shape the world for generations to come.”

Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO, said, “Gordon Moore defined the technology industry through his insight and vision. He was instrumental in revealing the power of transistors, and inspired technologists and entrepreneurs across the decades. We at Intel remain inspired by Moore’s Law and intend to pursue it until the periodic table is exhausted….”

Prior to establishing Intel, Moore and Noyce participated in the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor, where they played central roles in the first commercial production of diffused silicon transistors and later the world’s first commercially viable integrated circuits. The two had previously worked together under William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor and founder of Shockley Semiconductor, which was the first semiconductor company established in what would become Silicon Valley.

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The Writers Guild of America Would Allow AI In Scriptwriting, As Long as Writers Maintain Credit

The Writers Guild of America has proposed allowing artificial intelligence to write scripts, as long as it does not affect writers’ credits or residuals. Variety reports: The guild had previously indicated that it would propose regulating the use of AI in the writing process, which has recently surfaced as a concern for writers who fear losing out on jobs. But contrary to some expectations, the guild is not proposing an outright ban on the use of AI technology. Instead, the proposal would allow a writer to use ChatGPT to help write a script without having to share writing credit or divide residuals. Or, a studio executive could hand the writer an AI-generated script to rewrite or polish and the writer would still be considered the first writer on the project.

In effect, the proposal would treat AI as a tool — like Final Draft or a pencil — rather than as a writer. It appears to be intended to allow writers to benefit from the technology without getting dragged into credit arbitrations with software manufacturers. The proposal does not address the scenario in which an AI program writes a script entirely on its own, without help from a person. The guild’s proposal was discussed in the first bargaining session on Monday with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Three sources confirmed the proposal. It’s not yet clear whether the AMPTP, which represents the studios, will be receptive to the idea. The WGA proposal states simply that AI-generated material will not be considered “literary material” or “source material.” Those terms are key for assigning writing credits, which in turn have a big impact on residual compensation.

“Literary material” is a fundamental term in the WGA’s minimum basic agreement — it is what a “writer” produces (including stories, treatments, screenplays, dialogue, sketches, etc.). If an AI program cannot produce “literary material,” then it cannot be considered a “writer” on a project. “Source material” refers to things like novels, plays and magazine articles, on which a screenplay may be based. If a screenplay is based on source material, then it is not considered an “original screenplay.” The writer may also get only a “screenplay by” credit, rather than a “written by” credit. A “written by” credit entitles the writer to the full residual for the project, while a “screenplay by” credit gets 75%. By declaring that ChatGPT cannot write “source material,” the guild would be saying that a writer could adapt an AI-written short story and still get full “written by” credit.

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Humans Have Reclaimed ‘Land Size of Luxembourg’ Since 2000

Land reclamation is nothing new, but during this century there has been a significant rise in the creation of artificial land by humans, with a recent study showing that developers have added more than 2,500 sq km — an area equivalent to the size of Luxembourg — to coastlines since 2000. The Guardian reports: Using satellite imagery, Dhritiraj Sengupta, from the University of Southampton, and his colleagues analysed land changes in 135 large cities. Their results, published in the journal Earth’s Future, show that much of the recent land reclamation has occurred in the global south, with China, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates leading the way. Shanghai alone has added about 350 sq km of land. Most of the projects were driven by port expansion, a need for urban space and industrialization, while a small handful were “prestige” projects such as the palm tree-shaped islands of Dubai.

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