Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards) On Monday, OpenAI announced that visitors to the ChatGPT website in some regions can now use the AI assistant without signing in. Previously, the company required that users create an account to use it, even with the free version of ChatGPT that is currently powered by the GPT-3.5 AI language model....
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Microsoft splits up the Teams and Office apps worldwide, following EU split
Enlarge / Teams is being decoupled from the other Office apps worldwide, six months after Microsoft did the same thing for the EU. (credit: Microsoft/Andrew Cunningham) Months after unbundling the apps in the European Union, Microsoft is taking the Office and Teams breakup worldwide. Reuters reports that Microsoft will begin selling Teams and the other...
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Redis’ license change and forking are a mess that everybody can feel bad about
Enlarge / An Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center under construction in Stone Ridge, Virginia, in March 2024. Amazon will spend more than $150 billion on data centers in the next 15 years. (credit: Getty Images) Redis, a tremendously popular tool for storing data in-memory rather than in a database, recently switched its licensing from...
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What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Friday, a lone Microsoft developer rocked the world when he revealed a backdoor had been intentionally planted in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility available on almost all installations of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The person or people behind this project likely spent years on it....
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OpenAI Unveils Audio Tool That Recreates Human Voices
The start-up is sharing the technology, Voice Engine, with a small group of early testers as it tries to understand the potential dangers.
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Is Garry Tan San Francisco’s ‘Twitter Menace’ or True Believer?
The deep pockets of the tech investor Garry Tan are valued by his allies, but his pugnacious online habits are creating plenty of enemies in the city he says he wants to save.
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Playboy image from 1972 gets ban from IEEE computer journals
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Image) On Wednesday, the IEEE Computer Society announced to members that, after April 1, it would no longer accept papers that include a frequently used image of a 1972 Playboy model named Lena Forsén. The so-called “Lenna image,” (Forsén added an extra “n” to her name in her Playboy...
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Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility breaks encrypted SSH connections
Enlarge / Internet Backdoor in a string of binary code in a shape of an eye. (credit: Getty Images) Researchers have found a malicious backdoor in a compression tool that made its way into widely used Linux distributions, including those from Red Hat and Debian. The compression utility, known as xz Utils, introduced the malicious...
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OpenAI holds back wide release of voice-cloning tech due to misuse concerns
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Voice synthesis has come a long way since 1978’s Speak & Spell toy, which once wowed people with its state-of-the-art ability to read words aloud using an electronic voice. Now, using deep-learning AI models, software can create not only realistic-sounding voices, but also convincingly imitate existing voices using small samples of...
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(BPRW) Chevron Announces Opening of Fab Labs at HBCUs
(Black PR Wire) SAN RAMON, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Chevron U.S.A. Inc., a subsidiary of Chevron Corporation (NYSE: CVX), and the Fab Foundation today announced the official opening of Fab Labs at Fort Valley State University and Florida A&M Uni…