over-the-world – Tech Today w/ Ken May

NVIDIA’s ‘most powerful GPU’ ever is built for AI

NVIDIA’s newest Titan GPU is now available for purchase, and the company says it’s the “world’s most powerful GPU for the PC” yet. The GPU-maker has launched the Volta-powered Titan V at the annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference. Volta is NVIDIA’s latest microarchitecture designed to double the energy efficiency of its predecessor, and Titan V can apparently deliver 110 teraflops of raw horsepower or around 9 times what the previous Titan is capable of. This powerful new GPU’s target? Scientists and researchers working on AI, deep learning and high performance computing. Since Volta was designed to work on a mixture of computation and calculations and has features created specifically for deep learning, scientists can use the GPU to build their own desktop PCs if they don’t need special servers. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said during the event: “Our vision for Volta was to push the outer limits of high performance computing and AI. We broke new ground with its new processor architecture, instructions, numerical formats, memory architecture and processor links. With TITAN V, we are putting Volta into the hands of researchers and scientists all over the world. I can’t wait to see their breakthrough discoveries.” Those scientists and researchers probably need the backing of their educational institutions and donors to build computers with Titan V, though. The GPU, which is now available from NVIDIA’s website and retailers, will set them back $2, 999. Source: NVIDIA

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NVIDIA’s ‘most powerful GPU’ ever is built for AI

Uber just lost its London taxi license

In a surprise announcement today, Transport for London has confirmed that it will not reissue Uber’s private hire operating licence within the city. In a statement, the regulator said that the company operations were not “fit and proper” and noted that it will be allowed to accept new rides in London up until September 30th. Uber can appeal the decision, which will allow its cars to stay on the road until a final ruling is passed. According to Transport for London, Uber’s policies regarding the reporting of serious criminal offences, how it obtains medical certificates and performs driver checks did not meet its standards. It also noted Uber’s use of its “Greyball” software in the capital , which allowed the company to evade authorities all over the world by tagging known officials and serving up dummy versions of the app that were populated with ghost cars. This is a developing story, please refresh for updates.

One of 1st-known Android DDoS malware infects phones in 100 countries

Enlarge (credit: portal gda ) Last year, a series of record-setting attacks hitting sites including KrebsOnSecurity and a French Web host underscored a new threat that had previously gone overlooked: millions of Internet-connected digital video recorders and similar devices that could easily be wrangled into botnets that challenged the resources of even large security services. Now, for one of the first times, researchers are reporting a new platform recently used to wage powerful denial-of-service attacks that were distributed among hundreds of thousands of poorly secured devices: Google’s Android operating system for phones and tablets. The botnet was made up of some 300 apps available in the official Google Play market. Once installed, they surreptitiously conscripted devices into a malicious network that sent junk traffic to certain websites with the goal of causing them to go offline or become unresponsive. At its height, the WireX botnet controlled more than 120,000 IP addresses located in 100 countries. The junk traffic came in the form of HTTP requests that were directed at specific sites, many of which received notes ahead of time warning of the attacks unless operators paid ransoms. By spreading the attacks among so many phones all over the world and hiding them inside common Web requests, the attackers made it hard for the companies that defend against DDoS attacks to initially figure out how they worked. The attacks bombarded targets with as many as 20,000 HTTP requests per second in an attempt to exhaust server resources. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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One of 1st-known Android DDoS malware infects phones in 100 countries

As an "Eff-You" to Anish Kapoor, Artist Stuart Semple Makes Super-Black Paint Available to All

Should any artist possess the exclusive rights to a color? As you may remember, last year Anish Kapoor announced he had done just that with Vantablack, the blackest substance known to man. After Kapoor acquired those rights, however, Vantablack developer Surrey Nanosystems developed an even darker version . Architecture firms and deep-pocketed luxury watch manufacturers were reportedly interested in using the color. For the rest of us on ordinary budgets, British artist Stuart Semple collaborated “with thousands of artists from all over the world” to create Black 2.0 , a super-black paint with similar properties to Vantablack. Semple has been manufacturing it and making it available for £11.99 (USD $15) for a 150mL bottle. What’s amusing is that he’s clearly done this as an eff-you to Kapoor. Here are some of the paint’s listed properties: * Unique acrylic co-polymer binder enables more pigment load than any other acrylic paint * Developed for artists by artists * Non Toxic * Priced at what it costs to make * Shippable worldwide * Not available to Anish Kapoor And some of the descriptive copy: [Black 2.0] has been developed in close collaboration with thousands of artists from all over the world. Their amazing insight, support and inspiration has formed this unique super-black paint for the benefit of all artists* *Except Anish Kapoor IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE: this is not the blackest black in the world. It is however a better black than the blackest black in the world as it is actually usable by artists. *Note: By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this material will not make its way into the hands of Anish Kapoor. Black 2.0 has proven so popular that Semple’s last batch sold out. He’s been producing more and expects to have the next batch ready for sale by today, April 19th.