Archive for July 2023

There’s nothing like setting the bar high and Elon Musk recently announced in a Twitter Spaces audio chat that the purpose of his new AI company, xAI, will be to “understand the universe”. What Is xAI?  xAI is Elon Musk’s new startup that aims to build a kind of ‘good’ AI system that will lead to…

  July 1940 : “We Saw Them Coming”…. In July 1940, a Bristol Blenheim like this one was the first aircraft to successfully use radar to detect enemy aircraft, proving that radar could help provide an effective electronic defence whilst being deployed in the air. It’s often been said that Britain would have lost the…

Wordfence warned that large-scale attacks are under way against a vulnerability (CVE-2023-28121) in the in the WooCommerce Payments WordPress plugin. The flaw in the plugin, which is installed on over 600,000 sites, gives attackers authentication bypass so they can impersonate arbitrary users, and perform some actions, including as an administrator, potentially leading to site takeover.…

In this insight, we look at ‘voice changers’, technology that lets users change and disguise their voices in real time and in playback. What Do They Do & How?  Voice changing software (and hardware) alter the sound of a person’s voice in real-time or during playback. Voice changers can be implemented through software applications installed…

Following Apple recently becoming the first publicly traded company to close a trading day with a $3 trillion market value, we look at some of the main reasons for the company’s incredible popularity and growth. The First $3 Trillion Company  Although Apple actually reached the $3 trillion market cap at the beginning of last year,…

A recent update to Android 13 has led to reports of an increase in the number of false 999 calls / ‘silent’ calls. Reports By Police  The police have reported that an increase in the number of silent 999 calls in recent months is likely to be the result of the updated ‘SOS’ feature in…

Google DeepMind’s AlphaDev artificial intelligence (AI) system has produced new algorithms that can write code better than humans and could create better programs. Discovering Enhanced Algorithms  In a recent research paper, Google’s Deepmind has outlined how AlphaDev is able to use ‘reinforcement learning’ to discover enhanced computer science algorithms which surpass those honed by scientists…

Computers Before Keyboards Computing was a lot more challenging before July 4th 1956 because that’s when MIT revolutionised their Whirlwind Computer … by introducing a keyboard ! Before that, interacting with computers was a laborious, time-consuming process. Programmers would offer instructions to these mammoth machines by the manual insertion of punched cards, an operation requiring…

It’s been reported that a BBC investigation has uncovered tech flaws in two top brand, Chinese-made surveillance cameras that could enable hackers to control them and spy on businesses and organisations or use the flaws as a Trojan horse to interfere with computer networks. The software backdoor flaws in the Hikvision and Dahua are now…