Displaying items by tag: Development

Attackers are always looking to get targets coming and going. As such you have a very rich ecosystem of attack types to cover as much ground as possible. A concerning one has always been direct supply chain attacks. These attacks seek to compromise software during the development stage, so the malicious pieces get bundled into the released code and signed with a trusted certificate. The highly publicized attack on SolarWinds is one of those types of attacks and shows just how effective and dangerous they can be. Supply chain attacks some in multiple flavors including (but certainly not limited to) compromising code repositories, poisoned plugins or open-source packages, and targeting of developer systems.

If I were to build a list of companies that I would not want to build an AI project Meta, the parent company of Facebook is probably sitting at the top of the list. Yet here we are with a company known for manipulating users, user data and a proven habit of abusing the information it has. Meta is building an AI tool they are calling ImageBind that looks to expand on AI currently understands an environment. Most current AI image generators are (in very simple terms) texts to image generators. They take input in the form of words and create an image from learned input (again in very simple terms).

The other day while wading through the sludge that is the internet, I stumbled across a poll on Twitter asking the binary question “Who do you trust more with AI; Bill Gates or Elon Musk?” This led to a fun few hours diving deeper into that particular rabbit hole. I stumbled across articles where Bill Gates talks about AI via interviews as well as some interviews of Elon where he disparages Gates’ grasp on AI. Like I said, fun.

If you are a fan of science fiction movies, then you have probably seen multiple movies where an AI (Artificial Intelligence) has gone mad and decided that humankind needed to be eradicated. Everything from the Terminator series, through to the Matrix warns us of the dangers of creating something that is smarter and more powerful than ourselves. Of course, these are works of fiction, but they do represent an understanding of humankind’s hubris when it comes to creating artificial intelligence.

The Open Source community has been one that many leverage to help build their applications. It has become a great place to find applications packages that make building out a larger application or eco systems less time consuming. We see this in just about every development space from large to small. Having helpful sources of working code can speed up the development lifecycle and allow for greater interoperability as many applications use the same dependencies and core functions. The open source community is a great resource and typically is one that you can trust to pull code from.

One sad thing about the gaming world is the far too many great development studios seem to fade away and be absorbed by the big companies. If you look at the past we can see this repeated over and over again. One of the most recent to be assimilated is Irrational Games. This dev house was, in many ways, the spiritual successor of Looking Glass Studios who was responsible for the original System Shock and Thief. These two games gave us entirely new ways to move through a game world and have been the inspiration for a number of games since then.

When I first started covering the computer world the most common resolution was 640x680 with the hard core gamers getting 800x600. The dream of the day, which some called the golden age of gaming, was 1600x1200 with around 30Fps. Now the dream is “photo realistic” resolutions without the need for heavy anti-aliasing and texture filtering. Even in the mobile world this is becoming a bigger issue with retina displays on the Apple side of the world and 3 and 4k screens on the PC side.

Although there is enough news about the new iPhones and iOS8 already we thought we would finally chime in since there are now around six separate stories about the new device from Apple. We are seeing everything from high cellular usage to the phones bending in someone’s pocket. Apple, to their credit actually rushed out a fix for many of these issues… sadly the fix appears to make things worse.

A new report from security research firm, Aspect Security confirms what we have been saying for years: developers simply do not know how to secure their applications. In a recent study where a group of developers were asked questions on security Aspect found that about 80% of them did not know how to protect sensitive data. This is something that we have found in our experience in dealing with vendors and other application developers.

As the title of this article suggests there is another new video on the internet that claims to show the Windows 9 menu and how it all works. The appearance of the video comes on the heels of more than one alleged screen shot and some other items that have leaked from Microsoft themselves. As we all know Microsoft has a lot riding on the next version of Windows simply because of the lack of consumer acceptance that Windows 8.x has had.