Teckedin - Daily Curated Tech News - January - December 2023
  • 01 Dec 2023
  • 700 Minutes to read
  • Dark
    Light
  • PDF

Teckedin - Daily Curated Tech News - January - December 2023

  • Dark
    Light
  • PDF

Article Summary

All columns are sortable.


Title/LinkDescriptionCategory
iA Writer can now track what you or ChatGPT wrote


Security flaws in court record systems used in five US states exposed sensitive legal documents
One of the bugs was as easy to exploit as incrementing a document number in the browser’s address bar of one Florida court records system, said Parker. Another bug allowed anyone “automatic passwordless” access to a court records system by adding a six-letter code to any username, which Parker said they found as a clickable link in a Google search result.
Security
Cisco CCNA and AWS cloud networking rank among highest paying IT certifications
At number one on this year's list is Google Cloud-Professional Cloud Architect with an average annual salary of $200,960. Last year this certification ranked third, and Skillsoft expects that "developments in cloud - particularly the reliance on and maturation of the technology - have led many in the industry to entrust providers like Google with their data." Google recommends professionals have at least three years of experience before taking the $200 online or in-person exam for this certification, which lasts two years.
Training & Certs
Cradle raises $24M in Series A funding for Generative AI biotech platform
Founded in 2021 by co-founder and CEO Stef van Grieke, Cradle is building user-friendly, web-based software designed to be accessible to any team of scientists and experimentalists without the need for specialized bioinformatics or machine learning expertise. The software addresses traditional data obstacles in biotechnology, enabling companies to leverage generative AI and machine learning tools for accelerated research and development pipelines.
Artificial Intelligence
NetApp and AWS boost FSx for ONTAP performance
Scaleout FSx for ONTAP supports a single clustered system composed from two to six high-availability pairs of ONTAP file servers, each delivering up to 6 GBps throughput and 200,000 SSD-backed IOPS. A six-pair system can provide up to 36 GBps of bandwidth and 1.2 million IOPS, with sub-millisecond latencies from primary storage. Capacity (disk-based) storage latencies are in the tens of milliseconds area. Capacity in the primary (SSD) tier has risen from 192 TiB to 1 PiB.
Data Storage
Okta says hackers stole data for all customer support users in major cyber breach
While Okta may not be a household name, it plays a critical role in the cybersecurity systems of major corporations. The identity management company serves over 18,000 customers, offering a single login point for various platforms used by these organizations. For instance, Zoom utilizes Okta to provide seamless access to Google Workspace, ServiceNow, VMware, and Workday platforms.
Security
Broadcom aims to make network switches smarter with an on-chip neural network
The new Trident 5-X12 switching silicon features an integrated neural network engine called NetGNT (Networking General-purpose Neural-network Traffic-analyzer). According to Broadcom, this marks the first switch chip to contain an on-chip neural network, opening the door to more intelligent and efficient networks.
Network Management
New AWS program simplifies cyber insurance for small and medium-sized businesses 
The program leverages AWS Security Hub assessments that scan against the AWS Foundational Best Practices Framework for customers to provide results to insurance providers to present a price for coverage and steps to proactively lower their rate. The model is designed to benefit customers who work at adopting security best practices with lower rates.
Security
VAST Data claims vast cost-saving over Elastic File Service in Amazon’s cloud
This software powers VAST’s disaggregated storage filers on-premises with separate scale-out controller nodes accessing scale-out storage nodes, built with QLC flash drives across an NVMe fabric. File metadata is stored in storage-class memory class drives to speed access. The vendor has added software to this single-tier storage, including a data catalog and a combined transactional and analytical database
Data Storage
Cisco helps fund Aviz Networks’ SONiC network OS support efforts
The open-source SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) network operating system (NOS) is increasingly being adopted by organizations. While SONiC is a powerful and flexible system, there can be a need for support and additional tools to operate and maintain; this is where San Jose-based Aviz Networks is looking to play a strong role.
Network Management
Exclusive: Voltron Data brings new power to AI with Theseus distributed query engine
Theseus is optimized for running distributed queries on large datasets of 10 terabytes or more. It is targeted at companies with petabyte-scale data processing needs across Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, hedge funds, telcos, and media entertainment firms.
Data & Analytics
Kognitos reels in $20M for its natural language task automation platform 
San Jose, California-based Kognitos offers a software platform that makes it possible to create automation workflows with natural language instructions instead of code. The company claims its platform can speed up automation initiatives by weeks. Moreover, the fact that there’s no need for coding expertise simplifies the task of troubleshooting technical issues.
Automation & Productivity
AWS releases new cloud application monitoring features 
The tool also lends itself to other use cases. According to AWS, administrators can leverage myApplications to track workloads’ hardware usage and scan them for potential cybersecurity weak points. Additionally, the tool displays data on potential technical issues from another newly introduced feature, Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals, that also made its debut today.
Cloud
Dremio Delivers GenAI-Powered Data Discovery and Unified Path to Apache Iceberg on the Data Lakehouse
With this release, Dremio makes it simple for companies to adopt Iceberg through one-click command ingestion into Iceberg tables. Dremio can seamlessly convert raw data (in JSON, CSV, and Parquet formats) from data lakes, relational databases, data warehouses, and NoSQL databases into Apache Iceberg, both in the cloud and on premises
Data Management
Perplexity AI unveils ‘online’ LLMs that could dethrone Google Search
Now, the company has taken another step toward the possibility of being the premiere search destination, releasing its own AI large language models (LLMs) — pplx-7b-online and pplx-70b-online, named for their parameter sizes, 7 billion and 70 billion respectively. They are fine-tuned and augmented versions of the open source mistral-7b and llama2-70b models from Mistral and Meta.
AI/LLMs
AWS improves SageMaker Studio AI-development tool with new web-based interface, code editor 
The new web-based interface for Studio serves as a central point for launching all of SageMaker’s tools allowing machine learning developers to build, train, fine-tune and deploy models. It’s now possible to view every stage of development from the web interface and access foundation models through SageMaker Jumpstart. Amazon added that with the web interface, there is no more need to manually upgrade Studio.
AI/ML
Proton adds new Sentinel protective feature to its password manager 
Proton Pass is a relatively new product in the company’s encryption lineup, so it has avoided this history. But the timeline isn’t the only thing in its favor: It also inherits a careful security philosophy that encrypts all data, not just the username and password, which goes beyond what some of its competitors offer.
Security
Stability AI turbocharges text-to-image generation with SDXL Turbo
No longer do humans need to waste precious seconds or even minutes waiting for AI to generate an image based on their prompt. With the new SDXL Turbo mode announced this week by Stability AI, real-time image generation is now available to the masses.
Artificial Intelligence
ProcessMaker Introduces Groundbreaking AI Functionality in the Latest Release
ProcessMaker’s innovative AI features empower users to instantly transform text descriptions into BPMN 2.0-compliant process models, forms, and scripts, reducing the time and effort traditionally required in process design. AI assistants throughout the platform enable the automatic generation of functional scripts, democratizing process design and making it more accessible and efficient for users of all skill levels, regardless of technical experience.
Artificial Intelligence
Bitmagic launches public test for AI-based tool to create games with text prompts
The platform lets everyone be a game developer, as it enables gamers to execute their ideas in 3D. By typing a description into a text prompt, they can turn the hard work over to Bitmagic, which produces fully playable games based on the words.
AI/Gaming
CONGRUITY360 Pioneers Risk-Free “Smart Data” While Reducing Enterprise Storage and Backup Costs
Congruity360’s Enterprise Insights solution uses data classification to enable enterprises to glean insights quickly and accurately on data stores, highlighting key risk areas and opportunities to eliminate unnecessary files. Post classification, it’s easy to use only current, accurate, and risk-free files – smart data – to train AI software.
Data & Analytics
Investigation launched into attacks on water suppliers in Texas and Pennsylvania 
According to Politico, the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa was using equipment made by Unitronics Corp., an Israeli-owned company. Cyber Av3ngers is also said to have taken over control panels on the water authority’s equipment and left the message “every equipment ‘Made in Israel’ is Cyber Av3ngers legal target.”
Security
SentinelOne Expands Cybersecurity Capabilities, Positions for Growth
In a strategic move to enhance cybersecurity in software development, SentinelOne is teaming up with Snyk, a cybersecurity company providing a developer-first platform to help software developers find and fix vulnerabilities in their open-source libraries and containers. The new collaboration is significant, marking a substantial enhancement in vulnerability management.
Security
SiMa.ai and Supermicro Announce Partnership to Accelerate Power Efficient ML at the Edge
The integration provides customers a scalable approach for increasing video channels without scaling the host CPU performance. This provides for in-field upgrades for additional video channel support without swapping out the server or motherboard, which is an important consideration for deployed servers.
AI/ML
Dell provides $150M to develop an AI compute cluster for Imbue
While Dell has neither quite the star power nor the market capital of these rivals, it does have a solid hardware business that is now helping to build what potentially will be some of the most advanced AI models to date, putting the hardware company squarely at the forefront of AI research.
Artificial Intelligence
HPE, Nvidia partner on AI-optimized platforms and services
“We are delivering an out-of-the-box inferencing solution that enables customers to take pretrained models and deploy them into the environment and transform their operations, and to do it faster than they could before.”
Artificial Intelligence
Smart Engines Scientists Have Found a Way to Stop AI and Patented Their Technology in the USA
Smart Engines engineers have learned to predict the result of recognizing the next frame, and if it does not improve the current recognition result, the decision is made not to continue the process. The invention described in the patent made it possible to speed up the computing required for such decision-making by dozens of times. Thanks to this, document recognition in a video stream is faster and more accurate. On mobile devices, the technology allows for saving computing resources and battery life.
Artificial Intelligence
Automated forensic accounting startup Valid8 Financial closes on $8.5M funding round 
Valid8’s software incorporates artificial intelligence models and automation to rapidly parse, reconcile and categorize financial data from almost any kind of source, including bank transactions, cryptocurrency wallets and hand-written checks
Automation & Productivity
AWS rolls out new Titan AI models for image and text generation 
Amazon Titan models incorporate extremely large datasets and are designed to provide high-performing generative AI capabilities to customers, including text generation, image generation and vector search capabilities through fully managed application programming interfaces for the creation of AI applications. AWS pretrained these models to make them available for customers for numerous use cases that they can custom fine-tune for their purposes.
Artificial Intelligence
Smart glasses could boost privacy by swapping cameras for this 100-year-old technology
Scientists at Cornell University have created a technology, dubbed "PoseSonic". That combines micro sonar powered by CHIRP technology — a miniaturized version of the same technology used to map oceans or track submarines — with artificial intelligence (AI) to build an accurate echo profile image of the wearer. The micro sonar captures sound waves that are too quiet for human hearing.
Privacy
Together lands $102.5M investment to grow its cloud for training generative AI
 "Open source AI provides a strong foundation for these applications with increasingly powerful generative models being released almost weekly ... We believe generative AI is a platform technology, a new operating system for applications, and will have a long-range impact on human society. The AI ecosystem will consist of proprietary models and open models, and it’s incredibly important that this future has choice and options."
Artificial Intelligence
KX Launches KDB.AI Server Edition for Enterprise-Scale Generative AI
Unique among vector databases, KDB.AI enables developers to bring temporal and semantic context and relevancy to their AI-powered applications, giving them a comprehensive data search tool with unequaled flexibility.
Artificial Intelligence
Enhancing SOC efficiency: ManageEngine introduces ‘Vigil IQ’ for accurate threat detection 
Called Vigil IQ, the new feature, part of ManageEngine’s Log360 threat detection, investigation and response component, combines the power of accuracy and precision in threat detection. With a dynamic learning capability, Vigil IQ adapts to the changing nature of network behavior to cover more threat instances, spotting threats that get overlooked due to manual threshold settings to improve the detection system’s reliability.
Security
OctoML Launches OctoAI Text Gen Solution
The new release offers the fastest fleet of accelerated open source LLMs, including numerous configurations of Llama 2, Mistral, and the unique option to bring your own fine-tuned Llama 2 models.
Artificial Intelligence
Amazon’s Q AI assistant lets users ask questions about their company’s data
Amazon Q acts like an AI assistant where users can ask questions about their businesses using their data. For example, employees can query Amazon Q on the company’s latest guidelines for logo usage or understand another engineer’s code to maintain an app. Q can surface the information instead of the employee sifting through dozens of documents.
Artificial Intelligence
Matillion Adds AI Power to Pipelines with Amazon Bedrock
A longtime AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, Matillion adds generative AI integration with a prompt component supporting Amazon Bedrock to enable users to operationalise the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) inside the data pipeline, to address intelligent data integration tasks including data enrichment, data quality and data classification among others.
Data & Analytics
Apple and Google avoid naming ChatGPT as their ‘app of the year,’ picking AllTrails and Imprint instead
Surprisingly, however, Apple this year bucked the trend of highlighting apps that were new to the store or that had taken advantage of a recently released technology in an innovative way. Instead, its finalists for iPhone app of the year included apps that have long deserved accolades as well-built and well-designed mobile companions, including the language learning app Duolingo and travel app Flighty, in addition to winner AllTrails.
Apps
Fortanix launches Key Insight, a new tool for managing your enterprise’s encryption keys
Not only does the new Fortanix Key Insight tool maintain awareness of all the cryptographic keys your employees and trusted users and applications rely upon on, but it also provides an easy-to-use dashboard showing which keys are mapped to which services and users. And it does so in a glanceable, information-rich format.
Security
Astronomer Accelerates AI Workflows with Integrations for Top LLM Providers
Astronomer has announced a new set of Apache Airflow integrations to accelerate LLMOps (large language model operations) and support AI use cases. Modern, data-first organizations are now able to connect to the most widely-used LLM services and vector databases with integrations across the AI ecosystem, including OpenAI, Cohere, pgvector, Pinecone, OpenSearch, and Weaviate.
Artificial Intelligence
XM Cyber unveils advanced Kubernetes exposure management for hybrid cloud environments 
The company’s new Kubernetes Exposure Management offering has been designed to help security teams protect critical assets running in Kubernetes clusters across public cloud, private cloud and on-premises infrastructure. The solution delivers continuous visibility into vulnerabilities, risky permissions and misconfigurations that could allow attackers to breach Kubernetes environments and access valuable data and applications.
Security
Microsoft gives up on internet search to build a better AI brand
Microsoft is also making the chat version of Copilot available for free on the web. No longer do you have to use Bing to access it. You do, however, need a Microsoft ID or an Entra ID, which is issued by businesses as part of the company’s cloud identity and access management solution. The Copilot site works with Edge and Chrome in both Windows and macOS.
Artificial Intelligence
New ChatGPT-like AI Tool Mirrors Doctors’ Notes with Unbelievable Precision
The new ChatGPT-like AI tool, called GatorTronGPT, is a specialized version of ChatGPT that was developed by a team of researchers from NVIDIA and the University of Florida. It was trained on the health medical records of two million patients while keeping 82 billion useful medical words. This enabled GatorTronGPT to write clinical text similar to doctors’ notes, with high accuracy and quality.
ChatGPT
Informatica collaborates with AWS to streamline cloud data management services 
The ability to embed Informatica Data Loaders into the AWS Redshift Console leads the list of services and integrations. The integration offers simplified provisioning of data and allows users to load data into AWS from multiple disparate sources. Informatica Data Loader is pitched as being a high-speed, no-cost, simple tool requiring no setup for departmental users looking for frictionless, high-volume data loading that generates insights from data in minutes.
Data Management
Apple releases new NameDrop feature. How does it work and do you need to turn it off?
Although the feature is turned on by default it does require some user interaction to accept sharing any information, said Gillett. He advised people concerned for their safety that the "most safe" thing they can do is to turn the NameDrop feature off after updating to iOS 17.
Data Privacy
area|Talent Rolls Out AI-Powered Tool to Streamline the Job Search Process
area|Talent, a leading career strategy company, has announced the rollout of their new AI-powered job seeker platform, designed to help job seekers of all levels streamline their job search process. The platform offers a comprehensive suite of services, including resume building, resume writing, interview coaching, cover letter writing, resume scoring, and LinkedIn profile reviews.
Automation & Productivity
AWS rolls out new customization and management tools in its Bedrock AI service 
There’s the Amazon Titan series of AWS-developed large language models, or LLMs, as well as neural networks from other companies and the open-source ecosystem. AWS today debuted two new features, fine-tuning and continued pretraining, that will enable customers to customize the LLMs available in Bedrock for specific tasks.
Artificial Intelligence
Pika Labs raises $55M, launches new AI video platform to take on Runway
The company also unveiled Pika 1.0, a new web platform building upon its earlier beta release that allows users to generate and edit videos in diverse styles such as 3D animation, anime or cinematic – just from text prompts.
Automation & Productivity
AWS and NVIDIA Announce Strategic Collaboration to Offer New Supercomputing Infrastructure, Software, and Services for Generative AI
The companies will bring together the best of NVIDIA and AWS technologies—from NVIDIA’s newest multi-node systems featuring next-generation GPUs, CPUs, and AI software, to AWS Nitro System advanced virtualization and security, Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) interconnect, and UltraCluster scalability—that are ideal for training foundation models and building generative AI applications
Artificial Intelligence
Airbyte Announces Certified Connectors for MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL Databases Enhancing AI Data Accessibility
The Airbyte connector catalog is the largest in the industry with more than 370 certified and community connectors. Also, users have built and are running more than 2,000 custom connectors created with the No-Code Connector Builder, which makes the construction and ongoing maintenance of Airbyte connectors much easier and faster.
Data Management
AWS launches Cost Optimization Hub to help curb cloud expenses
The new Hub, according to the cloud services provider, gathers all cost-optimizing recommended actions across AWS Cloud Financial Management (CFM) services, including AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Compute Optimizer, in one place.
Cloud
Integrating Q-CTRL’s performance control software, IBM moves a step closer to quantum advantage 
That’s where Q-CTRL says it can help. The startup, which raised $27.4 million in a Series B-1 funding round in January, has created specialist software that helps tackle quantum unreliability by stabilizing the “qubits” that power them. The problem is that today’s existing quantum computers are incredibly fragile things.
Quantum Computing
Hololight raises $12M for XR streaming software
“We knew that we could speak their language. And by working with them, we figured out the problems, like not having enough processing power or how hard it was to integrate security when dealing with sensitive data on mobile devices. We just thought we can solve all these issues by streaming and putting everything on the server, leaving your secure data safe.”
Automation & Productivity
Starburst simplifies analytics on data lakes
Among the new features, which are part of a standard update cycle, is support for real-time analytics with streaming ingestion. Customers can leverage open-source Apache Kafka or the commercial version of Kafka from Confluent Inc. to hydrate a data lake in near-real time to ensure that applications have the most up-to-date information.
Data & Analytics
Amazon enhances its serverless data platforms to kick off re:Invent 2023 
The headline announcement was the introduction of Amazon Aurora Limitless Database, which is a new feature for the Amazon Aurora database that can automatically scale beyond its original write limits, making it much easier for developers to scale their applications. Also announced were new capabilities for Amazon ElastiCache and the Amazon Redshift Serverless database, designed to drive up workload performance while optimizing the platforms to manage costs
Data Management
IBM, FuelCell Energy to Use AI in Effort to Forge Longer-Life Fuel Cell Systems
IBM and FuelCell Energy, Inc. announced they will work together to boost the performance of FuelCell Energy’s technology using Foundation Models, a form of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). The aim of this collaboration is to support both companies’ efforts to lead a global transition to renewable energy sources that emit little to no carbon.
Sustainability
Design Flaw in Google Workspace Could Let Attackers Gain Unauthorized Access
Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a "severe design flaw" in Google Workspace's domain-wide delegation (DWD) feature that could be exploited by threat actors to facilitate privilege escalation and obtain unauthorized access to Workspace APIs without super admin privileges.
Security
LaunchDarkly Collaborates with AWS to Generate Product Experiments Using Amazon Bedrock
Using Amazon Bedrock, LaunchDarkly is able to reduce setup complexity and enhance product experimentation by rapidly generating new experiment variations, speeding up test and iteration cycles—securely and responsibly. This new capability will accelerate the ability for teams to efficiently explore wider ranges of new ideas, leveraging training from historical experiment data to enable smarter decision-making. For engineering teams and product leaders, the outcome is better experimentation results, in less time.
Automation & Productivity
Intuit QuickBooks doubles down on AI to help accountants stay competitive and drive small business growth
Intuit Assist will offer automated tasks and workflows, such as invoicing and action plans to help meet business goals, and answer pressing financial questions on the spot. Users will not only be able to ask it to perform tasks like sending invoices, sourcing profitability insights, identifying top-selling products by month and so on, but will have an assistant working in the background to proactively surface relevant insights based on a business’s performance and customers’ behavior.
Automation & Productivity
Meta’s EU ad-free subscription faces early privacy challenge
noyb contends that the cost of the subscription is “way out of proportion” to the value Meta derives from tracking users in the region — citing reporting by the company that the average revenue per user in Europe between Q3 2022 and Q3 2023 was just $16.79. That figure would equate to annual revenue of €62,88 per user — whereas Meta’s subscription puts a minimum annual cost for users on safeguarding their privacy of nearly €120, rising to over €250 for users who have both a Facebook and Instagram account.
Social Media
AWS Introduces Amazon One Enterprise
Amazon One Enterprise eliminates operational overhead associated with the management of traditional enterprise authentication methods, like badges and PINs. IT and security administrators can easily install the Amazon One devices and manage users, devices, and software updates in the AWS Management Console.
Security
Alleged GE hack raises concerns about US national security 
The hacker behind the alleged hack goes by the name of “IntelBroker” and was offering the stolen data for sale on the BreachForums hacking forum, which is not a dark web site but a regular internet forum easily found in Google. According to the listing, the hacker is selling the stolen data, which includes SSH and SVN access, DAPRA-related military information, SQL files and documents. The hacker does provide screenshots of the stolen information as proof of the hack.
Security
Caylent launches MeteorAI to expedite the cycle of generative AI solutions 
MeteorAI allows users to create customized secure data integrations that continuously ingest, transform, process and act on data in real time to support individual employee inference operations and programmatic back-office integrations.
Artificial Intelligence
Iridia looks to DNA for archival storage solutions
The technology involves nanopore-based cells with data (DNA strands) moved inside the cell, and data written (DNA strands added) and read (DNA strands sequenced) with error checking and correction. The chip will contain reservoirs filled with reagents, with fluid moved through tubes and into and out of reservoirs by commands from the semiconductor (CMOS) part of the chip. Individual elements have been proved to work and the bulk task now is integrating them on a single chip.
Data Storage
Fortanix launches ‘Key Insight’ for enhanced data security in hybrid multicloud environments 
Innovations debuting in Key Insight include the ability to discover all encryption assets and provide detailed mapping between encryption keys and data services in an easy-to-understand dashboard. Users can assess data security risk posture through visual heatmaps that quickly pinpoint risks, gaps and priorities against established policies, regulations, and industry standards.
Security
Trend Micro First to Market with AI-powered Cybersecurity Assistant for Security Teams
Threat alerts in Trend Vision One are model-driven to adapt to the changing threat landscape. However, AI alone is not enough to keep security teams working at peak efficiency. The data that it is built on is critical. This is the value of Trend's global threat research team and Zero Day Initiative—the world's largest vendor-agnostic bug bounty program.
AI/Security
Verta Launches Verta GenAI Workbench to Advance Generative AI Development
“The GenAI product development process today is a lot like the Gartner hype cycle: teams start at the peak of inflated expectations based on media excitement or a quick ChatGPT exploration, but rapidly enter a painful valley of disenchantment when they attempt to make the use case work consistently, with high quality, and at reasonable cost."
Artificial Intelligence
Couchbase announces columnar service for Capella on AWS to power adaptive, real-time applications 
Couchbase Capella is a cloud-hosted version of the Couchbase NoSQL database that is used to power complex business applications. Unlike traditional databases, such as Oracle Database, Capella can process both structured and unstructured data at the same time, making it a more flexible choice for certain kinds of apps.
Data Management
U.S., U.K., and Global Partners Release Secure AI System Development Guidelines
The guidelines also build upon the U.S. government's ongoing efforts to manage the risks posed by AI by ensuring that new tools are tested adequately before public release, there are guardrails in place to address societal harms, such as bias and discrimination, and privacy concerns, and setting up robust methods for consumers to identify AI-generated material.
Artificial Intelligence
Trellix Announces Cybersecurity Generative AI Innovations Powered by Amazon Bedrock
“We partnered with Trellix to explore new ways to automate investigations,” says Chuck Lerch, CXO Head of Cybersecurity, Cyberuptive. “In this groundbreaking work, we combined Trellix XDR Platform’s rich data and investigative playbooks with LLMs running on AWS to make comprehensive assessments of alerts. The results are providing useful insights and showing the value of being able to focus on security research instead of how to run an LLM at scale.”
AI/Security
AWS debuts Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client device for virtual desktop access 
The newly debuted WorkSpaces Thin Client is AWS’ entry into the thin client market. It’s a compact, rectangular device that workers can use to log into virtual desktops hosted on the cloud giant’s Amazon WorkSpaces service. Amazon WorkSpaces Web, a version of the offering that enables users to access virtual desktops from a browser, is supported as well.
Automation & Productivity
Malwarebytes Labs Reveals 50 Percent Uptick in Credit Card Skimming in Advance of the Holiday Shopping Season
Another risk to shoppers this holiday season is malvertising – online ads that deliver scams or install malware. This type of fraud is on the rise in both volume of malicious ads and the sophistication behind them. Over the past two months, Malwarebytes has tracked a 42% increase month-over-month in malvertising incidents in the US, pointing to an alarming trend. Recent research reveals malicious campaigns carried out in online ads via Google searches, some impersonating big-name brands and scams targeting online tech support for Windows users.
Privacy & Security
Aira Technologies Demonstrates RANGPT the First LLM-based RAN Query and Control Utility
RANGPT allows MNOs to interact with the network through conversational queries, to gain insights on the state of the RAN by analyzing network data. These insights help address performance issues and optimize energy consumption. A sequence of RANGPT queries and control instructions can be stitched together easily, to form the basis of RAN automation applications required to meet network opex reduction targets.
Network Management
Windows-as-an-app is coming
Windows App, which is still in beta, will let you connect to Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Dev Box, Remote Desktop Services, and remote PCs from, well, pretty much any computing device. Specifically, you can use it from Macs, iPhones, iPads, other Windows machines, and — pay attention! — web browsers.
Automation & Productivity
ConnectWise RMM Evolves to Unified Monitoring and Management Solution
This game-changing transformation introduces a host of enhanced capabilities to the ConnectWise Asio™ platform, including adding support for network, cloud, and backup monitoring. Moreover, ConnectWise unveils an innovative, real-time, interactive dashboard as part of this unification.
Automation & Productivity
DriveNets Joins Ultra Ethernet Consortium; Commits to Developing Open, Multi-vendor Ethernet Solutions for AI
DriveNets Network Cloud-AI – introduced in May and now available for order with Broadcom Jericho 3-AI based white boxes – offers the highest-performance AI networking solution available, based on trials with leading hyperscalers and independent testing by Scala Computing. It improves the performance of large-scale AI workloads regardless of GPU or AI accelerator used, enabling users to build open, multi-vendor AI infrastructures.
Network Management
NXT1 Introduces Launchit, a 100 Percent Serverless, Cloud-Native Platform for Deploying and Managing SaaS
“The idea for LaunchIT emerged from years of experience providing services for software vendors who marketed to regulated industries, and the public sector in particular,” said John Sobczak, CEO of NXT1. “We observed that in selling to the federal government, systems integrators, and other decision makers, cybersecurity and compliance challenges almost always present major obstacles. But we also identified a unique opportunity to accelerate any SaaS go-to-market approach by automating much of the supporting technology required for deployment."
Security
Radiant Security Secures $15 Million to Meet Growing Demand for AI-Enhanced Security
Today’s SOCs employ dozens of tools to help safeguard their environment from attacks and these tools generate so much noise that it’s nearly impossible for analysts to keep up. While security analysts spend countless hours performing the same tedious, time-consuming tasks over and over, they still barely scratch the surface. This model is both demoralizing and ineffective due to a reliance on human effort— a particularly scarce resource in the cyber community.
Security
Microsoft advances toward glass-based archival storage
The aim is to develop a cloud-scale archive media system for reading and writing data. The encoding technology is the production of areas with polarization-based patterns at points within a square glass slab, defined by 3D coordinates, and there can be hundreds of layers.
Data Storage
Next DLP and Torq Announce New Integration to Hyperautomate Insider Risk Detection and Response
Electric adventure vehicle company Rivian will leverage the deep visibility provided by the joint solution to shine a light on insider risk to prevent accidental data loss and stop malicious theft of valuable intellectual property. It will fully integrate Next DLP’s Reveal Platform—a user-centric, flexible, cloud-native, AI/ML-powered cybersecurity solution—with the enterprise-grade Torq Hyperautomation platform, which automates and connects complex security infrastructures at dramatic scale.
Risk Management
Nvidia launches Spectrum-X Ethernet stack for AI workloads
Spectrum-X, which integrates into Nvidia's Spectrum Ethernet stack, is a combination of hardware and software, melding the Spectrum-4 Ethernet switch (which boasts up to 51 terabits per second) and BlueField-3 DPU together, which are designed to work in tandem to reduce traffic congestion and potentially eliminate packet loss.
Network Management
Seagate’s Nytro 4350 NVMe SSD Delivers Consistent Application Performance and High QoS to Data Centers
Designed to improve QoS, the PCIe Gen 4 drive achieves over ten times the bandwidth while doubling the throughput of SATA SSDs. The Seagate Nytro 4350 SSD removes data bottlenecks with up to 58K IOPS random write speeds and up to 800K IOPS random read speeds to provide consistent response times and offers more computing power with less energy consumption with the drive’s 3.3V power supply.
Data Storage
Tech firm uses a brace of generative AI tools to slash content production times 
Since then, the company has adopted a growing collection of tools to help with creating search-optimized blog posts, e-books, sales collateral, marketing emails and sales scripts. It uses OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT for short-form content and Anthropic PBC’s Claude for long articles and e-books.
Automation & Productivity
New technique can accelerate language models by 300x
In experiments conducted on BERT, a transformer model employed in various language tasks, they achieved an astonishing reduction of more than 99% in computations. This innovative technique can also be applied to transformer models used in large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3, opening up new possibilities for faster, more efficient language processing.
Automation & Productivity
Stability AI debuts Stable Video Diffusion models in research preview
According to a blog post from the company, SVD and SVD-XT are latent diffusion models that take in a still image as a conditioning frame and generate 576 X 1024 video from it. Both models produce content at speeds between three to 30 frames per second, but the output is rather short: lasting just up to four seconds only.
Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic slashes AI pricing amid rising competition
For enterprise companies exploring opportunities in conversational artificial intelligence (AI), a new development promises greater access and affordability. Anthropic, a leading AI model lab, today dropped the per-token pricing of its conversational model Claude 2.1 release in response to growing competition from other large players, but perhaps more importantly, open source options.
Artificial Intelligence
Hackers steal 8.4M+ patients’ data from healthcare software company Welltok 
The hacking campaign was carried out by Clop, a ransomware group believed to be based in Russia. The cyberattacks exploited a zero-day vulnerability that made it possible to bypass MOVEit Transfer deployments’ authentication mechanism and download their data. Progress Software Inc., the service’s developer, first disclosed the vulnerability in May and uncovered a number of additional cybersecurity flaws a few weeks later.
Security
Claude 2.1: Anthropic’s ChatGPT Rival Gets New Killer Feature 
Anthropic has launched Claude 2.1, its latest and most advanced language model. By far the biggest and most noteworthy difference between Claude 2, which launched earlier this year, and Claude 2.1 is the amount of information that can be relayed to Claude via its message box.
ChatGPT
Google expands Bard’s YouTube integration
The Verge tested the feature by asking Bard to summarize a recipe discussed in a YouTube video. The chatbot completed the task, but not on the first attempt. Bard failed to understand a prompt that asked it for the “full recipe” and only fetched the information when it was instructed to find “step by step instructions.”
Automation & Productivity
Elon Musk’s new Grok AI will be available to all X Premium Plus subscribers first
The Grok chatbot uses machine learning, a branch of AI, to simulate human conversation in a similar way to how ChatGPT and other large language models communicate with users. Although the xAI chatbot is designed to have a sense of humor to make interactions more relatable and enjoyable for users. However adding personality to chatbots is not a new idea and can be incorporated even into ChatGPT using its Custom Instructions to make your conversations a little more “human”.
ChatGPT
Osium AI uses artificial intelligence to speed up materials innovation
So how does Osium AI actually work? It’s all about optimizing the feedback loop between materials formulation and testing using a data-driven approach. With the startup’s proprietary tech, industrial companies can predict the physical properties of new materials based on a list of criteria. After that, Osium AI can also help refine and optimize those new materials while avoiding common mistakes involved with trial and error.
Artificial Intelligence
Snowflake’s AI Breakthrough: Introducing New Managed Service Features
It said the new offering, which was launched at  the firm’s Snowday 2023 event and is currently in private preview, “gives users instant access to a growing set of serverless functions that include industry-leading large language models (LLMs) such as Meta AI’s Llama 2 model, task-specific models, and advanced vector search functionality
Artificial Intelligence
Adobe reportedly acquires text-to-video AI platform Rephrase
Founded in 2019 by Malhotra, Nisheeth Lahoti and Shivam Mangla, Rephrase provides enterprises with a platform (called Rephrase Studio) where users can create professional-looking videos with a digital avatar in minutes. All the user has to do is choose a video template, an avatar of choice with the preferred voice and add the content they need to deliver.
Automation & Productivity
Boomi doubles down on AI and automation
And integration, of course, is Boomi’s bread and butter. Large language models (LLMs) are the current wave in IT, he said, and because this lets “computers talk like humans instead of humans talking like computers”, one consequence is that “good programming today starts with a good generative prompt, not code”.
Artificial Intelligence
ChatGPT's voice chat feature is rolling out to free users
When the company first introduced voice chats, it admitted that the capability to create "realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech" presents new risks. It could, for instance, allow bad actors to impersonate public figures or anybody they want. As a result, it decided that ChatGPT's voice feature will focus on conversations.
ChatGPT
FreeBSD keeps Unix-like OS alive, boosts security and performance with v14
ZFS has its roots in the Oracle (previously Sun Microsystems) Solaris UNIX OS and has long held the promise of supporting very large storage volumes. Maste noted that OpenZFS 2.2 includes enhancements like block cloning, which provides a massive performance boost for copy-heavy workloads. In addition to improvements in OpenZFS itself, new tooling has been added and updated to improve the integration of ZFS in FreeBSD.
Data Management
Cerabyte demos ceramic-coated glass storage system
The German company has technology to create microscopic holes in a layer of a ceramic substance coating a square glass carrier. Holes are created with femtosecond laser pulses and laid down in a format similar to quick response (QR) codes with sequences of holes and no-holes representing binary zeroes and ones.
Data Storage
Sam Altman to return as CEO of OpenAI
People familiar with the negotiations say that the main job of this small initial board is to vet and appoint an expanded board of up to nine people that will reset the governance of OpenAI. Microsoft, which has committed to investing billions in the company, wants to have a seat on that expanded board, as does Altman himself
Artificial Intelligence
C3 AI brings its C3 Generative AI platform to AWS Marketplace 
The platform is built to process both structured and unstructured records. C3 Generative AI: AWS Marketplace Edition, the new version of the platform that debuted today, has a narrower focus. It’s designed to help users more easily analyze text stored in files such as Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and webpages.
Artificial Intelligence
DPRK Hackers Masquerade as Tech Recruiters, Job Seekers
It's during the interview that the malicious actor sends the applicant an npm-based package hosted on GitHub. This package contains "Beavertail," a heavily obfuscated, JavaScript-based infostealer and loader. It targets basic system information as well as credit card and cryptocurrency wallet details stored in a victim's browser. It also retrieves and runs a second payload, "InvisibleFerret."
Security
Hammerspace hammering out AI ref architecture
Hammerspace’s software uses parallel NFS. It says a parallel file system architecture is critical for training AI as countless processes or nodes need to access the same data simultaneously. Its orchestration software provides an AI training data pipeline that can deliver the necessary data to very large numbers of GPUs.
Artificial Intelligence
Verta Launches the Verta GenAI Workbench to Help Teams to Get to Useful GenAI Faster
Geared toward GenAI product builders of all technical levels, the Workbench utilizes a unique combination of automated machine learning and human feedback, enabling builders to rapidly experiment with and refine custom Large Language Model (LLM) solutions for their GenAI applications.
Artificial Intelligence
LucidLink secures $75M to boost remote collaboration
LucidLink’s FileSpaces product has file sections streamed directly from a central cloud repository rather than being synchronized and shared between remote worker locations. This sync ‘n’ share approach is how it characterizes the services offered by CTERA, Egnyte, Nasuni, and Panzura.
Data Management
AI automation startup for social media Munch raises $7.2M in seed funding led by A* Capital
Enter Munch, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based AI startup that uses Generative AI to extract the most engaging and trending clips from long-form videos, creating short videos ideal for social media sharing. By doing so, Munch aims to reduce the burden on content professionals by leveraging AI to streamline the resource-intensive process, extracting bite-sized clips from lengthy videos ready for social media sharing within minutes.
Marketing Tech
Dell places multi-cloud storage navigation in its APEX
APEX is a set of services from Dell where it supplies its compute, storage and networking gear through a public cloud-like subscription model. Navigator is a software agent, an automation engine, for setting up things like a VMware cluster or multi-cloud storage. They can be automatically deployed and managed.
Data Storage
Arcitecta upgrades Mediaflux to add streamlined data management
Mediaflux is an unstructured data silo-aggregating software abstraction layer with a single namespace that can store files and objects in on-premises SSDs, disk or tape, or the public cloud, with a database holding compressed metadata. There is a fast Mediaflux data mover to put files in the appropriate storage tier.
Data Management
Microsoft offers to match pay of all OpenAI staff
Evan Morikawa, an engineering manager at OpenAI, has claimed that 743 out of 770 employees at OpenAI have signed a letter calling on the board to resign - with staff themselves threatening to leave if their demands are not met.
Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic's ChatGPT rival Claude can now analyze 150,000 words in one prompt
The company said version 2.1 also halves Claude’s hallucination rate, leading to fewer erroneous answers (like those the ChatGPT lawyer trusted far too much). Coincidentally or not, the update arrives as the tech world watches Anthropic’s rival OpenAI descending into pandemonium.
ChatGPT
AI21 nabs $53 million more to challenge OpenAI in enterprise generative AI
Instead, enterprise companies require robustly programmed applications for deployment, which requires a lot more work. He said scripting tools like Langchain that developers have adopted to pull in OpenAI’s LLMs via an API “point in the right direction, but true enterprise AI requires full programs to be written.” He added: “In two years, I bet we won’t be talking about LLMs, but about ‘AI systems,’ Shoham said.
Artificial Intelligence
Expanso Raises $7.5M to Transform Big Data Landscape with Distributed Data Approach
The open-source software Bacalhau (bacalhau.org), developed and backed by Expanso, is built on the principle of “Compute Over Data,” which means that it brings the processing jobs to where the data is, rather than moving the data to the cloud first.
Data & Analytics
Meta opens up data from Instagram and Facebook for researchers 
The Meta Content Library and API tools will go a step further by providing comprehensive access to content across Facebook and Instagram, beyond any research tools that the company has built to date. Meta said in its announcement that it will help it meet new regulatory requirements on data-sharing by providing near real-time access to the public content from Pages, Posts, Groups and Events on Facebook, and creator and business accounts on Instagram.
Data Privacy
New AI-enabled video surveillance cameras take analytics to the next level
To that end, i-PRO has just announced a new line of cameras that turn non-AI network cameras into AI smart devices. Using AI onsite learning, the X Series enables users to teach the camera about specific objects they want to monitor. With support for up to nine AI applications, it is the most powerful AI camera to date from i-PRO.
AI/Analytics
CISA Offering Free Cybersecurity Services to Non-Federal Critical Infrastructure Entities
In addition to offering CISA-provided commercial shared services to critical infrastructure entities, the pilot program will allow the agency to stress-test its service delivery mechanisms and prove it can deliver these cybersecurity services at scale.
Security
AWS launches AI Ready initiative to equip 2M people with AI skills 
Learners at the beginning of their upskilling journey can start with Introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence, which covers basic concepts in generative AI and common uses for the technology. The two other courses that AWS offers for nontechnical learners cover more advanced topics. One is designed to teach business leaders how to plan generative AI projects, while the other provides an introduction to AWS CodeWhisperer, an AI service that makes it possible to write software with natural language prompts.
Artificial Intelligence
Confluent unveils data streaming for AI for real-time applications
To help companies unlock the full potential of AI with the freshest contextual data from across their business, Confluent is expanding partnerships with leading companies in the AI and vector database space, including MongoDB, Pinecone, Rockset, Weaviate, and Zilliz.
Artificial Intelligence
Sunbird is shutting down its iMessage app for Android
Sunbird, the app that brings iMessage to Android, has temporarily shut down the service over “security concerns,” as first reported by 9to5Google. In a notice to users, Sunbird says it has “decided to pause Sunbird usage for now” while it investigates reports that its messages aren’t actually end-to-end encrypted.
Data Privacy
Microsoft releases Orca 2, a pair of small language models that outperform larger counterparts
Today, the research arm of the Satya Nadella-led company dropped Orca 2, a pair of small language models that either match or outperform five to ten times larger language models, including Meta’s Llama-2 Chat-70B, when tested on complex reasoning tasks in zero-shot settings.
Artificial Intelligence
Data stolen in hack of nuclear energy testing facility Idaho National Lab 
According to a message shared on its Telegram group and subsequently on X, SiegedSec claimed that it obtained “hundreds of thousands of user, employee and citizen data”  in the hack, including full names, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, address, employment information and “lots lots more!” The group is also sharing a link to the files.
Security
Rockset boosts AI capabilities for vector database search
With the new update, Rockset is pushing further into the generative AI realm, with the general availability (GA) of vector search as part of the real time database platform. The vector search capability was first previewed in April and has been expanded and improved over the last several months leading up to full availability now.
Artificial Intelligence
Neo4j and AWS team up to enhance generative AI applications with graph database technology 
The idea is to combine knowledge graphs with native vector search in order to reduce the occurrence of so-called “hallucinations,” while ensuring models become more accurate, transparent and explainable. The partnership will also solve headaches around the need for long-term memory for large language models trained on specific enterprise datasets.
Artificial Intelligence
Unveiling Project Dojo: Fusing Machine Learning and Crypto for Next-Gen Innovation
Project Dojo is more than just a cryptocurrency. it’s a disruptive force powered by a robust vision and a vibrant community. With its rallying cry of “Super Processes,” it introduces an in-house supercomputer designed by the ingenious minds. This supercomputer is tailored explicitly for conquering the challenges of machine learning, paving the way for groundbreaking utilities like AI bots.
AI/ML
United We Care Unveils Stella 2.0 – First Ever Global Virtual Coach: Transforming from Generative AI to Cognitive AI
“As the global mental health crisis deepens, we are making the big moves to address the needs of individuals by introducing Stella 2.0, a transformative shift from Generative AI to a Cognitive AI Conversational Global Virtual Coach who can interact in over 20+ languages, detect almost all human emotions and can assess with over 90% efficacy."
Artificial Intelligence
Introducing Cloaked AI: The IronCore Labs Encryption SDK for Protecting AI Embeddings in Vector Databases
Large language models are shifting the paradigm for how AI products are built and where private data is stored. While private AI data used to be in the model, now it’s captured as embeddings and stored in vector databases. These databases store everything from internal proprietary documents to chat histories and medical diagnoses.
Data Management
Lasso Security emerges from stealth to wrangle LLM security
For starters, when manipulated the right way — via prompt injection or jailbreaking — models can reveal their training data, organization’s and users’ sensitive information, proprietary algorithms and other confidential details.
Security
Hundreds of OpenAI employees threaten to resign and join Microsoft
In a letter to OpenAI’s board that was reported on this morning by Wired and journalist Kara Swisher, more than 500 current OpenAI staffers say that “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.”
Artificial Intelligence
Microsoft hires former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
“We’ve learned a lot over the years about how to give founders and innovators space to build independent identities and cultures within Microsoft, including GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn, and I’m looking forward to having you do the same.”
Artificial Intelligence
Researchers warn of advanced evasion techniques in LummaC2 v4.0 malware 
Information stealers are not new, but where LummaC2 v4.0 becomes interesting is its anti-sandbox mechanism. The new version delays the malware’s activation until it detects genuine human mouse activity, countering analysis systems that fail to emulate realistic mouse movements. LummaC2 v4.0 uses trigonometry to discern between human and artificial mouse movements, hampering the efforts of cybersecurity researchers in analyzing and mitigating such threats.
Security
AI-powered restaurant platform startup Malou raises $10M
The platform offers a centralized hub, integrating a restaurant’s Google page, social media profiles and listing and delivery platforms. AI and automation are then used to analyze and generate responses to customer reviews, generate social media posts and maintain consistent information to enhance the restaurants’ online presence, search engine optimization, visibility and social media engagement.
Marketing Tech
Kumo.AI Unveils New Predictive AI Platform Featuring SQL-like Predictive Querying Language
While generative AI excels at natural language understanding and generation, it lacks the capability to perform more complex, enterprise-specific tasks, such as predicting customer behavior or detecting fraudulent transactions. Kumo.AI is the first platform that bridges this gap by applying deep representation learning, a technology behind the current AI revolution, to enterprise data in data warehouses.
Artificial Intelligence
MediaTek Unveils RedCap Solutions to Deliver 5G Data Rates and Impressive Power Efficiency to a Broad Range of IoT Devices
RedCap, which stands for “reduced capability,” is designed to bring the benefits of 5G to NR consumer, enterprise, and industrial devices. Taking full advantage of the evolution of 5G networks to the Standalone (SA) network architecture, RedCap promises to deliver reliability for devices that have low bandwidth requirements, offering many of the benefits of 5G without the cost and complexity of typical 5G solutions.
5G
Kyndryl Unveils New Services for VMware Private AI, Advancing Generative AI and AI/ML Applications
Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, today announced it has developed new services and capabilities for an extended VMware Private AI reference architecture to help customers more easily build, deploy and manage new generative AI and traditional AI/ML (machine learning) applications at scale across private, public and hybrid cloud environments.
AI/ML
Esri Enhances ArcGIS Platform with New Services for Developers: Places and Data Hosting Introduced
Access points of interest data that encompasses a variety of location- and attribute-based criteria, describing features in Earth’s built and natural environments. This includes retail locations, public facilities, and landscapes. Places offers insight into what attracts people to a location and supports site selection, market analysis, and distribution planning.
Data & Analytics
Google Mixes Structured Data Formats
Once again, Google, the undisputed ruler of online searches and information, has set the stage for a revolutionary shift that is shaking the foundations of the internet. Imagine having the ability to blend structured data forms, producing a more rich and engaging web presence. Google’s latest statement has made this a reality, marking a significant moment for digital marketers and website owners alike.
Data & Analytics
Nothing Chats has already been pulled from Google Play over privacy issues
The removal came after users widely shared a blog from Texts.com showing that messages sent with Sunbird’s system aren’t actually end-to-end encrypted — and that it’s not hard to compromise it. The app launched in beta yesterday after being announced earlier this week.
Data Privacy
Thanks To OpenAI, You Can Now Make Your Own Version Of ChatGPT
OpenAI’s GPTs (Generic Purpose Technologies) artificial intelligence agents will be available for purchase in the GPT Store in the coming weeks. OpenAI has promised to pay authors an undefined sum based on the number of times their GPTs are used, but details regarding the store’s appearance and functionality are still few. ChatGPT Plus users and OpenAI corporate clients will be allowed to create GPTs for internal use exclusively.
ChatGPT
OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO
A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him.
Artificial Intellignce
Exclusive: Germany, France and Italy reach agreement on future AI regulation
During the discussions, the European Parliament proposed that the code of conduct should initially only be binding for major AI providers, which are primarily from the U.S.
Artificial Intelligence
Amazon lays off hundreds from Alexa unit amid generative AI refocus 
Amazon debuted the newest generative AI feature addition to Alexa, a capability called Let’s Chat, in September. Currently, users have to say a so-called wake word before every request they make to the voice assistant. Let’s Chat removes that requirement and allows Alexa to take into account information from past inquiries when processing a new user request.
Artificial Intelligence
Proton Mail plans to tap blockchain tech for email encryption key verification 
Blockchain technology uses multiple cryptographically protected ledgers that mirror one another to make it nearly impossible to tamper with them after an entry has been added. Every transaction submitted to a blockchain is also verified and agreed upon before it’s added to the distributed ledger network and then integrated into a “block,” which is then “chained” on top of previous blocks. The combination of cryptography and exact copies of distributed ledgers gives it enhanced security over basic databases.
Blockchain
U.S. Cybersecurity Agencies Warn of Scattered Spider's Gen Z Cybercrime Ecosystem
"Scattered Spider threat actors typically engage in data theft for extortion using multiple social engineering techniques and have recently leveraged BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware alongside their usual TTPs," the agencies said.
Security
Microsoft expands SSE, adds zero-trust network access
Microsoft first introduced its SSE services under the Entra name in July as an early preview of its capabilities. At the Microsoft Ignite conference this week, the SSE platform was significantly expanded with more availability and capabilities than what was first previewed in July. The Entra name is Microsoft’s new brand for its identity and access control technologies, including the technology formerly known as Active Directory and now known as Entra ID
Security
Matillion to Bring No-Code AI to Pipelines
The addition of a low-code/no-code graphical AI Prompt component will enable every data engineer to harness prompt engineering within LLM-enabled pipelines and materially boost productivity, whilst unlocking the infinite opportunities of unstructured data.
Artificial Intelligence
Frontegg Creates Open Source Project HARmor to Enable Safe Use and Sharing of HAR Files
“Tokens in HAR files have been used to attack a major software vendor’s customers. We see customer support organizations at particular risk. Tokens are potent weapons, if leaked or accessed through social engineering, for example. We decided to provide a robust, universally applicable solution immediately to prevent widespread damage to customers and their trust in their software providers.”
Security
Beware: Malicious Google Ads Trick WinSCP Users into Installing Malware
The threat actors are believed to leverage Google's Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs), which automatically generates ads based on a site's content to serve the malicious ads that take the victims to the infected site.
Security
Microsoft's new app brings Windows to Chromebooks, Macs - for select users 
In a blog post, Microsoft dropped the details on Windows App, a service that allows users to access Windows devices and apps on a number of different platforms, including desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, and desktop web browsers -- including Chromebooks and Macs. Essentially, the new app lets you stream a copy of Windows running on one PC to another device.
Automation & Productivity
Unpatched Critical Vulnerabilities Open AI Models to Takeover
The affected platforms are used for hosting, deploying, and sharing large language models (LLM), and other ML platforms and AIs. They include Ray, used in the distributed training of machine-learning models; MLflow, a machine-learning lifecycle platform; ModelDB, a machine-learning management platform; and H20 version 3, an open source platform for machine learning based on Java.
Security
HYCU reaches 50 SaaS app connector landmark
“Introducing R-Cloud unlocked the ability to visualize an entire data estate, learn what data was protected and unprotected, and with 1-click simplicity, turn on protection when no other way was possible. This offered companies a simple yet powerful way to protect their entire data landscape."
Data Storage
SlashNext Delivers Industry’s First Multi-Channel Quishing Protection to Block Malicious QR Codes in All Business and Personal Messaging Channels with 99 Percent Accuracy
SlashNext’s QR Code Phishing Protection is the first security solution to offer multi-channel Quishing protection that blocks malicious QR codes in email, mobile, web and messaging channels such as Slack, iMessage, Microsoft Teams, and more.
Security
AI startup Tradespace secures $4.2M in seed funding to uncover $1 trillion unrealized IP value
In conjunction with the funding, Tradespace has unveiled its AI-powered IP Management Platform, heralding the future of intellectual property. This platform aims to streamline the research process for IP teams, saving both time and money, while simultaneously revealing new opportunities for portfolio value through avenues such as commercialization, partnerships, financing, and mergers and acquisitions.
Automation & Productivity
FinOps Foundation debuts first major release of its FOCUS cloud billing standard 
The FinOps Foundation is an industry consortium that was launched by the Linux Foundation three years ago. The group introduced FOCUS, or the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification, this past May. The round-number release it debuted today, FOCUS version1.0-preview, is a major technical milestone that signals the technology is now closer to production-ready status.
Cloud
Keysight’s open platform makes network testing easier, vendor neutral
A core component of KENG is support for the open-source Open Traffic Generator (OTG) API project, which was started by Keysight in 2020. According to Keysight, the KENG software is the first platform of its kind based on an open, vendor-neutral API. Keysight says it represents a significant shift away from closed, proprietary legacy testing approaches.
Network Management
Back-office stack for startups company Every launches with $9.5M in funding 
Back-office tasks such as payroll, taxes and accounting are at the core of what Every is offering, providing startup founders with accountants and payroll specialists for expert guidance. Support provided includes filing state taxes, helping founders choose the best healthcare plan and creating a customized treasury management plan to optimize yield while ensuring 100% of funds are insured.
Automation & Productivity
Microsoft recommits to open source AI models, despite OpenAI investment
Yet, because open source models are by definition free-to-use and deploy for enterprise applications (licensing permitting), Microsoft’s move to offer such models on its Azure platform — where the paid Azure OpenAI service has already been available for the better part of the year — means that it may actually be costing its own investment/ally OpenAI some revenue.
Artificial Intelligence
Scaleway delivers cost-optimized Ampere Altra instances as an alternative for AI workloads 
The company said Ampere’s Altra processors can be a more affordable option for companies wanting to run AI training and large language model inference applications. Ampere is an agnostic, Arm-based processor developer that partners with cloud infrastructure providers, helping them to create their own data center processors. For instance, it previously collaborated with AWS, helping it to design its popular Graviton virtual machines.
Automation & Productivity
Apple says iPhones will support RCS in 2024
The iPhone adopting RCS could enable support for encryption, read receipts, typing indicators, high-res images and videos, and more, when sending texts between iPhone and Android devices. Apple will let users share locations in text threads and RCS messages will be green, like SMS messages are now, the company confirmed to 9to5Mac.
Automation & Productivity
Tanium looks to coin new acronym for endpoint management automation
At the company’s Converge 2023 event this week, Tanium announced its vision for an autonomous endpoint management (AEM) platform. AEM aims to drive greater efficiency and faster risk mitigation than current endpoint management technologies, through increased automation and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered capabilities. AEM is an evolution of Tanium’s converged endpoint management (XEM) technologies.
Network Management
Databricks debuts AI-powered Data Intelligence Platform
One component, Databricks Assistant, allows users to query data using natural-language prompts. The software automatically turns those prompts into SQL queries or Python code. Moreover, Databricks Assistant can ease related tasks such as optimizing an existing Python script a company’s data scientists use for analytics projects.
Data Management
Meta announces new breakthroughs in AI image editing and video generation with Emu 
EMU was announced in September and today it’s being used in production, powering experiences such as Meta AI’s Imagine feature that allows users to generate photorealistic images in Messenger. In a blog post, Meta’s AI researchers explained that generative AI image generation is often a step-by-step process, where the user tries a prompt and the picture that’s generated isn’t quite what they had in mind. As a result, users are forced to keep tweaking the prompt until the image created is closer to what they had imagined.
Automation & Productivity
Google DeepMind breaks new ground with ‘Mirasol3B’ for advanced video analysis
“Some of the modalities might be well synchronized in time (e.g., audio, video) but not aligned with text,” they explain. “Furthermore, the large volume of data in video and audio signals is much larger than that in text, so when combining them in multimodal models, video and audio often cannot be fully consumed and need to be disproportionately compressed. This problem is exacerbated for longer video inputs.”
Automation & Productivity
IONIX launches Threat Exposure Radar to strengthen attack surface visibility 
Threat Exposure Radar offers a unified view of critical exposures across the entire enterprise attack surface, including cloud, on-premises, software-as-a-service and third-party systems. The capability allows security teams to visualize and prioritize hundreds of attack surface threats into a manageable set of specific, actionable insights with one-click workflows to clear next steps, simplifying and accelerating remediation.
Security
Martian debuts novel AI model mapping technology for apps to leverage multiple LLMs at once 
The Model Mapping technology is designed to understand LLMs by converting them into formats that are easier to study and understand. For instance, an LLM might be converted from numbers in matrices to human-readable programs in order to understand how it works. Companies can then build applications based around that understanding.
Artificial Intelligence
Profet AI Launches AILM, the World’s 1st Enterprise AI Lifecycle Management Platform for AI Governance
Manufacturing leaders universally recognize the pressing need for AI adoption. However, according to the “Manufacturing Leadership Council’s 2023 Industrial AI in 2030 survey,” only around 29% of companies have integrated their AI initiatives into formal plans or strategies, despite 96% of manufacturers planning to increase investments in AI.
Artificial Intelligence
Adobe is using AI to break apart messy audio
Adobe is working on a new audio tool designed to break apart different layers of sound within a single recording. The tool is called Project Sound Lift, and it can use AI to separate elements like applause from the sound of someone’s voice.
Automation & Productivity
Matillion to Bring No-Code AI to Pipelines
The model-agnostic design will allow users to choose their preferred LLM, set the right context, and drive prompts at speed and scale. Seamlessly integrating with existing systems, the technology will enable information extraction, summarization, text classification, NLP, sentiment analysis and judgment calls on any source that Matillion connects to.
Artificial Intelligence
ServiceNow expands Now Assist family of generative AI agents 
The new Now Assist in Virtual Agent, flow generation and Now Assist for Field Service Management offerings are available to all customers via the ServiceNow Store. They’re said to reduce the time workers spend searching, summarizing and creating basic information, providing an immediate productivity boost.
Automation & Productivity
Cloud Security Alliance launches industry-first ‘Certificate of Competence in Zero Trust’ 
The course and certification seek to address the growing demand for a zero-trust approach in information security. A poll from Gartner found that 60% of organizations are expected to embrace zero trust by 2025. The CSA argues that a zero-trust-based approach will inevitably become a requirement for organizations and a required skill for a range of security professionals, including security engineers and architects, C-suite and other decision-makers.
Security
Informatica Unveils New Unified Cloud Analytics Experiences with Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service
Informatica collaborated with Microsoft engineering and the Azure OpenAI Service team to use the relevancy and accuracy of their large language models to develop CLAIRE GPT, launched at Informatica World 2023 as the next generation, generative AI version of its benchmark AI engine, CLAIRE. CLAIRE GPT provides a natural language interface to data and Intelligent Data Management Cloud, transforming how users discover, understand, govern, and consume data through simple conversational interactions
Data & Analytics
Microsoft to add Project features to its new unified Planner work management app
To track more straightforward team and individual work, Microsoft has added more broadly accessible tools to its portfolio in recent years. Planner, which launched in 2016, is a comparatively simple work management app aimed at less complex team projects, while To Do is for personal task tracking.
Automation & Productivity
Meta calls for new legislation around how teens download apps from app stores 
Davis called this a “simple, industry-wide solution,” although ultimately, it doesn’t address the inherent harms social media might be doing to young folks. Still, as Davis says, if this is used in conjunction with social media companies creating “age-appropriate features and settings,” it may help a bit. But that might depend on how savvy the average parent is to the possible negative effects of social on their child.
Social Media
Microsoft announces Mirroring, a way to copy databases
While Google is also working hard to create open formats (see our exclusive OneTable news today), Microsoft’s bigger customer base and more robust range of services, gives it an upper hand. But with Mirroring, Microsoft is also taking the gloves off against upcomer analytics competitors Databricks and Snowflake, which have gained momentum recently by trying to make data sharing easier.
Data & Analytics
Cubbit’s DS3 Composer builds virtual private public clouds
Cubbitt is an Italian startup that has developed low-cost DS3 geo-distributed, partially decentralized storage (Web3) using unused storage capacity in existing datacenters or provisioned capacity in colocation and managed service provider datacenters. There is a centralized component – the Coordinator – which manages metadata, S3 gateways, and clusters of storage nodes) called Swarms
Web3
Microsoft marries SIEM and XDR with genAI in unified security platform
The unified security operations platform is designed to offer a single experience with higher efficiency and ease of use for security teams. Jakkal added the genAI capabilities from the Security Copilot can help create a single set of automation rules and security playbooks, which makes coordinating responses easier and quicker for analysts of any level.
Security
Zip Raises $7.7 Million to Expand SMB Cybersecurity Business
Zip’s philosophy is to put into practice a simple method of implementing law enforcements’ recommendation — get the basics right, and you will mitigate most cyber threats. It does this, says the company, “by integrating across best-in-class security tools including CrowdStrike, Okta, Jamf, and Microsoft Intune, allowing small businesses to run similar security programs to large corporations at a fraction of the time and cost.”
Security
Microsoft’s Maia AI, Azure Cobalt chips to rev up efficiency, performance
After months of speculation that Microsoft was developing its own semiconductors, the company at its annual Ignite conference Wednesday took the covers off two new custom chips, dubbed the Maia AI Accelerator and the Azure Cobalt CPU, which target generative AI and cloud computing workloads, respectively.
Automation & Productivity
Tanium’s new AI service aims to streamline cybersecurity operations and endpoint management
The releases seek to address the issue wherein resource constraints in IT and the increasing pace, frequency and sophistication of cyberthreats create the need for an autonomous platform to automate everyday operational tasks and better identify threats and vulnerabilities. Tanium also argues that the challenges highlight the importance of real-time data for AI, since organizations using stale or slightly outdated data do not realize the full benefits of AI.
Security
Seagate HAMR drives come to Corvault
Corvault is an intelligent JBOD-type 4RU chassis with up to 106x 3.5-inch drives, and VelosCT ASIC controllers. It currently runs with Exos 18TB and 20TB conventional magnetic recording (CMR) drives, using ADAPT erasure coding to protect the data and recover from any drive failure. An ADR (Autonomous Drive Regeneration) function is deployed in the chassis to recover from a failed platter surface or head in a ten-platter drive.
Data Storage
White House Unveils National Spectrum Strategy
Use of some of these bands is already underway, however. "This approximately 2,790 megahertz of spectrum represents a mix of bands for potential expanded governmental and non-governmental use for an array of advanced, next-generation applications and services:"
Automation & Productivity
Exclusive: Microsoft and Google join forces on OneTable, an open-source solution for data lake challenges
The OneTable project, which was started by Onehouse, is an attempt to create a new layer that sits on top of the data lake table formats that enables omni-directional conversions and access across Iceberg, Hudi and Delta Lake.
Data Management
Scality debuts ARTESCA hardware appliance for Veeam users
Scality provides RING enterprise-class object storage, with file support, and lighter-weight, object-only, containerized ARTESCA software. This is currently available as a VMware OVA (Open Virtual Appliance) or in software-only form.
Data Storage
Google’s new GraphCast AI model can forecast the weather 10 days in advance
In an internal test, the company compared GraphCast with a weather forecasting algorithm called HRES that is known for its reliability. GraphCast achieved higher accuracy than HRES across more than 90% of the 1,380 weather variables that were analyzed during the test. The AI system performed even better when the scope of the task was limited to the troposphere, the part of the atmosphere that is located directly above the Earth’s surface.
Artificial Intelligence
Nothing is bringing iMessage to its Android phone
 Nothing Chats will let owners of the Phone 2 send iMessages to iPhones. It’s the first time an Android OEM has integrated something like this into a device.
Automation & Productivity
US federal judge says social media giants must face child safety lawsuits 
School districts all over the U.S. have launched what is reported to be hundreds of such lawsuits against Google LLC-owned YouTube, Meta Platforms Inc.-owned Facebook and Instagram, ByteDance Ltd.-owned TikTok, and Snap Inc.-owned Snapchat.
Social Media
SecureAuth’s Arculix gets new identity orchestration features
This is not a new concept: Risk levels and login methods are constantly being adjusted by the management software to specific situations, so that a remote login might be subject to more scrutiny and require more details than a local one, for example. SecureAuth has long been a leader in this type of authentication.
Security
OfferFit gets $25M to kill A/B testing for marketing with machine learning personalization
Reinforcement learning forms the backbone of OfferFit’s automated marketing solution, which ingests data about its clients’ customers and marketing efforts-to-date, and automatically figures out the optimal messages to send at the optimal times on the optimal channels to each and every single customer — even if the userbase is in the millions, as is the case with large enterprises such as Capital One.
Automation & Productivity
Salesforce adds more generative AI features to Sales Cloud
Sales representatives can expect to get a lot of help with the launch of the Einstein Copilot for Sales, which is a generative AI assistant that will aid with tasks such as researching accounts, updating the customer relationship management platform and preparing for meetings. It will be accessible to users anywhere, including on their mobile device, Salesforce said.
Automation & Productivity
Software security startup Vulcan Cyber raises $34M to fuel product innovation 
Vulcan Cyber customers use the platform’s capabilities to reduce the most critical attack surface risk and improve overall cyber hygiene by integrating hundreds of security tools and data sources to rationalize spending and help customers get the most out of the investments. The platform offers a composite view of the customer’s unique cyber risk exposure across all attack surfaces using business and asset contexts.
Security
OpenAI aiming to create AI as smart as humans, helped by funds from Microsoft 
The company is now offering a custom GPT feature through which subscribers can create their own chatbots for specific tasks. A GPT store is due to open later this month, featuring the best GPTs for sale and eventually letting its creators share in the revenue. OpenAI also expanded the knowledge cutoff dates for both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, improving the AI's prowess as a research tool. But AI remains the core product.
ChatGPT
New KasadaIQ suite helps enterprises predict and prevent account takeover and fraud 
The first service in the suite, KasadaIQ for Fraud, supplies actionable intelligence for businesses who need insight into how bots target their digital channels and customer data. Combined with Kasada’s visibility into nontraditional data sources and adversary communities, KasadaIQ for Fraud provides the capability to detect attacks before they happen and confirm threats that would otherwise go undetected.
Security
Startup Fractl releases its language for building generative AI applications to open source 
The company said the Fractl language is based on business-level abstraction, which makes it better-suited for AI-powered code generation than traditional languages such as JavaScript and Python. The language uses declarative abstraction, a programming concept that expresses the logic of a computation without explicitly defining its control flow, to reduce complexity and allow developers to focus on business outcomes.
Artificial Intelligence
Ericsson ramps up RAN work as 5G market slumps
As the overall RAN market takes a 5G breather, Ericsson is bolstering its radio access network (RAN) portfolio with four new RAN units, a pair of new carrier aggregation software options, two new artificial intelligence (AI)-endowed routers and a new transport controller.
Network Management
YouTube to require disclosures for realistic-looking AI-generated videos 
When a user indicates that a newly uploaded clip contains synthetic content, YouTube will add a disclosure to the clip’s description. If the synthetic content is about a sensitive topic, the Google unit will embed a more prominent disclosure directly in the video player. “Some synthetic media, regardless of whether it’s labeled, will be removed from our platform if it violates our Community Guidelines,”
Artificial Intelligence
OneSpan Launches Passwordless, Phishing-Resistant Authentication for a Secure Workforce
It provides a cost-efficient, adaptable, and future-proof solution that overcomes traditional multi-factor authentication (MFA) limitations. With DIGIPASS FX1 BIO, organizations can safeguard employees, partners, and corporate resources while enabling a flexible 'work from anywhere, anytime, on any device' policy without compromising security.
Security
Cycode launches ConnectorX for enhanced app security posture management 
Launching with support for Wiz Inc. and Black Duck by Synopsys Inc., in addition to the more than 40 existing software development lifecycle integrations, ConnectorX provides companies with the choice to use Cycode’s native ASPM tools or maximize their investments in their existing AppSec tools. Using ConnectorX, companies can plug in any AppSec solution and gain accurate, real-time visibility into their security posture within minutes.
Security
Running thousands of LLMs on one GPU is now possible with S-LoRA
S-LoRA dramatically reduces the costs associated with deploying fine-tuned LLMs, which enables companies to run hundreds or even thousands of models on a single graphics processing unit (GPU). This can help unlock many new LLM applications that would previously be too costly or require huge investments in compute resources.
Artificial Intelligence
Ethical Web AI Launches AI Seek 4.0 with Almost Real-Time Data
Version 4.0 of AI Seek is delivered purely by upgrades made to our back-end services, and the mobile apps themselves are not involved in delivering the contemporaneous, near real-time functionality. Consequently, the mobile apps themselves still show Version 3.0 in the settings section. Ethical Web AI is already developing Version 5, which will include embedded multimedia in its output, which will be another patented capability unique to AI Seek. Version 5 does require changes to the mobile apps, so the version number in the app will change.
Artificial Intelligence
Innovative technology from Typecast allows generative AI to transfer human emotion
The technology allows users to apply emotions recorded from another’s voice to their own while maintaining their unique style, thus enabling faster, more efficient content creation. It is available today through Typecast’s My Voice Maker feature.
Artificial Intelligence
ChatGPT's New Code Interpreter Has Giant Security Hole, Allows Hackers to Steal Your Data
ChatGPT's recently-added Code Interpreter makes writing Python code with AI much more powerful, because it actually writes the code and then runs it for you in a sandboxed environment. Unfortunately, this sandboxed environment, which is also used to handle any spreadsheets you want ChatGPT to analyze and chart, is wide open to prompt injection attacks that exfiltrate your data.
Security
New Lacework features provide full visibility through the application development lifecycle 
Software Composition Analysis gives customers continuous visibility into third-party software libraries and associated vulnerabilities, including direct and indirect dependencies. The approach goes beyond basic SCA functionality and gives teams constant visibility into exactly where vulnerable functions are used in the code, including how often each is referenced, who was responsible for bringing it in and who owns fixing the code.
DevOps
dtSearch Announces Concurrent, Multithreaded Searching for Terabytes of Data
The product line’s proprietary document filters cover popular “Office” formats, website data, databases, compression formats, and emails with attachments. dtSearch products can run either on premises at organizations or in a cloud environment such as on Azure or AWS.
Data & Analytics
OSS Unveils New Gen 5 AI Transportable Compute Server
OSS AI Transportables are differentiated from traditional edge AI infrastructure by having the highest-speed data center-class processing, input/output, networking and storage technologies. OSS AI Transportables meet stringent, mil-spec requirements for shock and vibration, redundancy, operating temperature, altitude and uninterrupted power.
Automation & Productivity
Cyber Attackers Take a Swipe at McLaren Health Care’s Database
The fully integrated healthcare delivery system is worth $6.6 billion. The data breach exposed the personal and health information of nearly 2.2 million patients spanning 14 hospitals in Michigan, ambulatory surgery centers, imaging centers, a 490-member employed primary and specialty care physician network, and commercial and Medicaid HMOs
Security
Seagate Unveils Exos CORVAULT 4U106: Advancing Mass Data Storage with 2.5PB Capacity
The Seagate Exos CORVAULT 4U106 features Seagate’s high capacity Exos hard drives, which, combined with self-healing technology, create the most efficient petabyte storage building block for scale-out data center architecture, reducing storage networking resources up to 50% and improving total rack power efficiency up to 30%
Data Storage
Google takes legal action against scammers using fake Bard ads to spread malware 
Google said the scammers have been able to “exploit public enthusiasm for generative AI” by posting ads on social media that appear to be a download for Bard, despite Bard being web-based and free. When the victims hit the download, instead of AI that offers them advice, they get malware that steals their social media credentials.
Security
Panasas Introduces S3-Compatible PanFS 10, Bridging Cloud and On-Premise AI/HPC Workloads
PanFS 10, which powers Panasas’ ActiveStor portfolio of storage appliances, utilizes a unique shared-nothing architecture that now supports Seagate Exos 2X18 with MACH2 dual-actuator technology, enabling up to double the performance for the ActiveStor system.
Data Management
Cisco leans on partners, blueprints for AI infrastructure growth
The company recently announced four new Cisco Validated Designs for AI blueprints from Red Hat, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Cloudera to focus on virtualized and containerized environments as well as converged and hyperconverged infrastructure options. Cisco already had validated AI models on its menu from AMD, Intel, Nutanix, Flashstack and Flexpod.
Artificial Intelligence
Dell and Hugging Face partner to simplify LLM deployment
With the partnership, the two companies will create a new Dell portal on the Hugging Face platform. This will include custom, dedicated containers, scripts and technical documents for deploying open-source models on Hugging Face with Dell servers and data storage systems.
Artificial Intelligence
Arcitecta debuts universal data platform to enable global information accessibility at lower costs
Its Mediaflux Universal Data System is designed to get around the inefficiencies of the clustered file systems in use by many organizations today. While these can support data storage across multiple servers to enable greater scale and easy access, they lack the sophisticated tools required to manage and orchestrate that information effectively.
Data Management
YouTube is going to start cracking down on AI clones of musicians
YouTube will give music labels a way to take down content that ‘mimics an artist’s unique singing or rapping voice.’ Creators will also be required to label AI-generated content beginning next year.
Artificial Intelligence
Cohesity launches early access program for its Cohesity Turing AI toolkit 
Turing, the AI feature suite that Cohesity is making available in early access, debuted six months ago. It allows administrators to search the data their organizations store in Cohesity’s platform using natural language commands. Turing lends itself to more advanced tasks as well: an administrator could, for example, use it to analyze employees’ data access patterns for signs of unauthorized file usage.
Data & Analytics
LiquidStack expands into single-phase liquid cooling
The tanks support both 19-inch and 21-inch standard server racks. They also support multiple IT form factors, including 1U, 2U, 4U, 600mm, 750mm, OCP, ORV3 and more, with N to 2N Tier IV redundancy system to ensure high resiliency and reliable operations.
Data Management
FTC hosts challenge to stop harms of voice cloning AI
According to a tentative agenda posted by the agency ahead of its upcoming meeting this Thursday, November 16, the FTC will “announce an exploratory Voice Cloning Challenge to encourage the development of multidisciplinary solutions—from products to procedures—aimed at protecting consumers from artificial intelligence-enabled voice cloning harms, such as fraud and the broader misuse of biometric data and creative content. “
Artificial Intelligence
Streamlining Back-office to Rails: IntellectEU Launches Catalyst Integration Manager
CAT-IM enables business processes to flow smoothly across different software solutions, whether on-premises or in the cloud. The manager gives financial institutions the ability to coordinate complex multi-step, multi-application workflows, design complex customer-specific flows, and streamline the process of integrating with (Payment) Rails and blockchain networks.
FinTech
Nurdle emerges from Spectrum Labs as AI deployment startup for enterprises
Nurdle is an evolution of the promising project initiated within Spectrum Labs, designed to streamline and refine custom private Large Language Models (LLMs) through a proprietary “lookalike” data technology.
Artificial Intelligence
AI tech startup Ozone launches with $7.1 million to revolutionize video editing
Since its inception in a dorm room at MIT, the Ozone team has focused on developing the next generation of creative tools to enable content creation teams to collaborate seamlessly on video projects, eliminating the complexities of user interfaces and the need for time-consuming video file uploads and downloads.
Automation & Productivity
Cohesity tuning Turing data cloud front end into context-aware answer generator
In our view Turing’s new capabilities are effectively Cohesity’s data cloud co-pilot. It joins Commvault’s Airlie, Druva’s Dru, and Rubrik’s Ruby in providing a conversational virtual white-glove concierge helper to help users navigate complex data protection universes faster.
Automation & Productivity
Silo AI unveils Poro, a new open source language model for Europe
The 34.2 billion parameter Poro 34B model, named after the word for “reindeer” in Finnish, utilizes a BLOOM transformer architecture with ALiBi embeddings. It was trained on a partition of the 21 trillion token multilingual dataset covering English, Finnish, and programming languages like Python and Java.
Artificial Intelligence
Google in talks to invest in AI startup Character.AI
Founded by former Google employees Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.AI enables users to engage with virtual versions of celebrities and create their own chatbots and AI assistants. While the platform is free, it offers a subscription model at $9.99 per month for users seeking expedited access to chatbots.
Artificial Intelligence
Palo Alto Networks adds new AI-related security features to its Cortex line 
Cortex XSIAM v2.0 now has the ability to add any machine learning framework to Cortex, which is something many of the company’s enterprise customers have asked for since the AI explosion of the past year. It’s accomplished using the open-source Jupyter Notebook tool.
Security
Network Perception partners with Claroty for enhanced operational technology cybersecurity 
Key to the announcement is the need for an audit platform to proactively alert network administrations to at-risk changes and vulnerabilities. “The exponential growth of unmanaged OT and XIoT network assets has made critical infrastructure more vulnerable to external threats,”
Security
Pure Storage’s AIRI reference architecture nabs Nvidia BasePOD certification 
The certification that Pure Storage announced today demonstrates AIRI complies with Nvidia’s BasePOD technical specification. Introduced last year, the specification ensures the components of an AI system reference architecture work well with one another. Before certifying a system, Nvidia also validates that it delivers “expected performance” for common AI workloads.
Data Storage
Microsoft Warns of Fake Skills Assessment Portals Targeting IT Job Seekers
"Several malicious domains and subdomains host these websites, which entice recruiters to register for an account," the company added. "The websites are password-protected to impede analysis."
Security
Iterate introduces AppCoder LLM, allowing enterprises to build AI apps with natural language
The focus has largely been on low-code development, but Iterate is taking steps to get rid of the coding layer entirely. The California-headquartered company, known for building and deploying AI and emerging technologies to private, edge or cloud environments, today announced the launch of AppCoder LLM – a fine-tuned model that can instantly generate working and updated code for production-ready AI applications using natural language prompts.
Artificial Intelligence
New ThreatX Capabilities Empower Security Teams to Correlate & Block Threats to APIs from the Edge to Runtime
The ThreatX RAAP solution is designed to protect against runtime threats within Kubernetes (K8) environments. Leveraging Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technology, ThreatX RAAP positions security teams to discover unknown APIs; detect and protect against zero days; and track suspicious east/west traffic, insider threats, and malicious OS-level commands. In addition, ThreatX RAAP provides the ability to alert Security Operations or block these attacks in real-time.
Security
Adobe researchers create 3D models from 2D images ‘within 5 seconds’ in new AI breakthrough
“Imagine if we could instantly create a 3D shape from a single image of an arbitrary object. Broad applications in industrial design, animation, gaming, and AR/VR have strongly motivated relevant research in seeking a generic and efficient approach towards this long-standing goal,” the researchers wrote.
Automation & Productivity
Humane officially launches the AI Pin, its OpenAI-powered wearable
The AI Pin is powered by a Snapdragon processor — though it’s not clear which one — and you control it with a combination of voice control, a camera, gestures, and a small built-in projector. The Pin itself weighs about 34 grams, and the “battery booster” adds another 20. The built-in camera takes 13-megapixel photos and will capture video as well after a software update.
Automation & Productivity
DeepInfra emerges from stealth with $8M to make running AI inferences more affordable
DeepInfra, a new company founded by former engineers at IMO Messenger, wants to answer those questions succinctly for business leaders: they’ll get the models up and running on their private servers on behalf of their customers, and they are charging an aggressively low rate of $1 per 1 million tokens in or out compared to $10 per 1 million tokens for OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo or $11.02 per 1 million tokens for Anthropic’s Claude 2.
Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI launches partner initiative focused on creating AI training datasets
“We’re interested in large-scale datasets that reflect human society and that are not already easily accessible online to the public today,” OpenAI detailed in a blog post. “We’re particularly looking for data that expresses human intention (e.g. long-form writing or conversations rather than disconnected snippets), across any language, topic, and format.”
Artificial Intelligence
Picsart just launched 20+ AI tools to accelerate digital content creation
“At Picsart, we believe that everyone is a creator. Our editing experience reflects this philosophy by providing users with powerful, yet fun and easy-to-use tools to express their unique visions. We developed these features to…enable users to turn their ideas into stunning visual content – whether they’re posting ads for their business, memes for their friends, or anything in between,"
Automation & Productivity
Microsoft warns SysAid vulnerability is being used to deploy Clop ransomware 
According to Microsoft, after exploiting the vulnerability, Lace Tempest issued commands via the SysAid software to deliver a malware loader for the Gracewire malware. This is typically followed by human-operated activity, including lateral movement, data theft and ransomware deployment
Security
Cisco, KDDI, Fujitsu drive open optical network deployment
Cisco Systems, Fujitsu and operator KDDI recently turned on a metro network in Japan that uses an open architecture combining the IP layer and optical transmission layer to smooth operations and reduce power consumption by up to 40%. The network shows continued momentum toward an all-photonic network (APN) architecture.
Network Management
VMware enlists Intel, IBM watsonx for private AI initiative
Private AI, as VMware describes it, is essentially a generative AI framework designed to let customers use the data in their own enterprise environments — whether public cloud, private cloud or on-premises — for large language model (LLM) training purposes, without having to hand off data to third parties.
Artificial Intelligence
Google Cloud is making GKE Enterprise generally available
GKE, or Google Kubernetes Engine, is a managed Kubernetes service that Google launched in 2014. It reduces the amount of effort involved in running container environments. GKE automatically adds and removes hardware resources as workloads requirements change, spares users the need to manually download Kubernetes updates, and eases a range of other maintenance tasks.
Automation & Productivity
New Malvertising Campaign Uses Fake Windows News Portal to Distribute Malicious Installers
The signed MSI installer that's hosted on the rogue website contains a malicious PowerShell script, a loader known as FakeBat (aka EugenLoader), which serves as a conduit to deploy RedLine Stealer on the compromised host.
Security
BigID’s newest tool provides intelligent recommendations to prioritize and remediate data security risks 
It’s powered by an artificial intelligence-based recommendation engine that absorbs all of the notifications and warnings about data risks. It assesses each one in real time in order to prioritize those that are most urgent, and then indicates the most optimal course of action to remediate the danger. BigID said its recommendations are based on the last known actions that were carried out on similar types of sensitive data within the environment
Security
Gong Forecast gets AI upgrade, improving accuracy 20% over CRM revenue forecasting
“When we think about predictions that are fueled by not just CRM data, but conversational intelligence, real—time customer interactions — those create a much more powerful, precise, accurate prediction,”
Data & Analytics
Hollywood actors’ strike ends with deal to ‘protect members from the threat of AI’
A number of tech startups have sprung up and already begun working with actors and musicians and performers to digitize their likenesses as “digital twins,” including UK-based Metaphysic, which seeks to also offer a platform for monetizing the digital twins on behalf of their sources.
Artificial Intelligence
Digital twin firm Duality AI launches cloud-based platform for testing robots 
Duality develops a product known as Falcon, which is a powerful 3D virtual world product built on the Epic Games Inc.’s Unreal Engine. It’s capable of simulating real-world conditions and recreating objects such as terrain, buildings, cars, furniture and other obstacles otherwise known as digital twins.
Automation & Productivity
Researchers Uncover Undetectable Crypto Mining Technique on Azure Automation
The study mainly set out to identify an "ultimate crypto miner" that offers unlimited access to computational resources, while simultaneously requiring little-to-no maintenance, is cost-free, and undetectable.
Security
Collaborative defense: Snyk and SentinelOne integrate platforms to bolster cybersecurity 
The integration has been designed to address the issue wherein security teams typically have visibility into runtime threats but lack context regarding vulnerabilities in code and container images. On the flip side, developers have a view into code and build-time vulnerabilities but no insight into runtime threats and deployed environments.
Security
Patch now: Unauthenticated attackers target severe Atlassian Confluence vulnerability 
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-22518, is an improper authorization vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated attacker to reset Confluence and create a Confluence instance administrator account. Using a compromised account, an attacker can perform all administrative actions available to a Confluence instance administration, including total loss of confidentiality, integrity and availability.
Security
New SecuriDropper Malware Bypasses Android 13 Restrictions, Disguised as Legitimate Applications
Android 13 introduced a new security feature called restricted settings. This new feature prevents sideloaded applications (i.e., downloaded out of the Google Play Store) from directly requesting accessibility settings and notification listener access — two features that are often abused by malware according to ThreatFabric’s researchers.
Security
Orange Business adds managed VMware SD-WAN
The VMware SD-WAN integration is the first for Orange Business’s Evolution Platform. This platform allows enterprise customers to “compose” their own services through a self-service console or an API, which can also be used to service chain those offerings, with those services managed by Orange with service level agreements.
Network Management
Threat-informed defense startup Tidal Cyber raises $5M for platform growth 
Tidal’s platform helps customers map the security requirements and capabilities of their environment against a complete knowledge base of adversary tactics, techniques and products, known as TTPs for short. The platform includes the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base, additional open-source threat intelligence sources and a Tidal-curated registry of security products mapped to specific adversary TTPs.
Security
Monte Carlo Data wants to make sure the vector databases powering AI models stay reliable
“Our new Kafka integration gives data teams confidence in the reliability of the real-time data streams powering these critical services and applications, from event processing to messaging. Simultaneously, our forthcoming integrations with major vector database providers will help teams proactively monitor and alert to issues in their LLM applications."
Artificial Intelligence
Qumulo file system goes native on Azure
Its Scale Anywhere concept matches NetApp’s data fabric vision in scope and arguably provides a more scalable and parallel filesystem than NetApp’s ONTAP in the public clouds and Dell’s APEX File Storage for AWS.
Data Management
Dell expands object storage to meet AI and analytics needs
Gartner estimates that between 2022 and 2026, large enterprises will triple their unstructured data capacity stored as file or object storage on-premises, at the edge or in the public cloud. The firm reports that its end users see their unstructured data growing more than 30% year-over-year.
Data Storage
iMerit Introduces a Defect Detection Solution for Advanced Manufacturing and Warehouse Robotics
iMerit’s defect detection application enables AI development teams to build high-precision machine learning models for fully-automated production lines on the manufacturing floor. The solution can be fully customized to streamline defect detection on material surfaces in manufacturing environments, enabling manufacturers to tailor it to their specific factory needs.
Automation & Productivity
Google expands Anthropic partnership after Microsoft and Oracle detail AI collaboration 
Anthropic offers a large language model called Claude that it positions as an alternative to OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT. The model has helped the company secure an investment worth up to $2 billion from Google, as well as billions of dollars in additional funding from other backers, including up to $4 billion from Amazon.com Inc. As part of the expanded partnership the companies detailed today, Anthropic will run Claude on Google Cloud’s TPU v5e chips.
Artificial Intelligence
PX5 and Percepio Enhance Safety, Security, and Deep Visibility for Embedded IoT Applications
“PX5 RTOS is purpose-built to deliver safety, security, and portability benefits to devices across all IoT sectors, and Tracealyzer adds even more robust capabilities to see exactly what takes place before a system crash and understand firmware better to enhance and optimize applications.”
IoT
ChatGPT is currently down in a ‘major’ OpenAI outage
OpenAI’s ChatGPT service is currently down and inaccessible for its 100 million weekly active users. ChatGPT went down shortly before 9AM ET / 6AM PT and has remained inaccessible for nearly an hour now. OpenAI says it’s experiencing a major outage that’s also impacting the company’s API services. ChatGPT users are being greeted with a “ChatGPT is at capacity right now” message.
ChatGPT
‘ChatGPT Detector’ Catches AI-Generated Papers with Unprecedented Accuracy
The findings suggest that efforts to develop AI detectors could be boosted by tailoring software to specific types of writing, Desaire says. “If you can build something quickly and easily, then it’s not that hard to build something for different domains.”
ChatGPT
Samsung unveils ChatGPT alternative Samsung Gauss that can generate text, code and images
Samsung Gauss Code, which works with its code assistant called code.i, focuses more specifically on development code. The idea is that Samsung Gauss Code could help developers write code quickly. Samsung said the AI model for code will support “code description and test case generation through an interactive interface.”
ChatGPT
OctoML launches solution for customizing AI image generation models at scale 
At the core of the release is a new “Asset Orchestrator” that will allow developers to fine-tune their models with assets such as Low-Rank Adaptations or LoRAs. A LoRA is a fine-tuning model that permits a user to quickly train Stable Diffusion on different concepts, such as a particular character or style.
Artificial Intelligence
Windows Hello for Business: Passwordless authentication for Windows shops
Windows Hello acts on one of two fronts: It can scan one’s fingerprint, or it can take an infrared picture of a user’s face and perform analysis on it. (Hello also supports iris scanning, but since iris cameras are better suited to phones than to laptops or desktop displays, the former two methods are more practical for the enterprise.)
Privacy & Security
Commvault re-integrates Metallic service into expanded security cloud 
One of the core features of the new cloud offering is an artificial intelligence “co-pilot” called Arlie (short for “autonomous resilience”) that assists users with tasks ranging from verifying recovery points to generating code.
Cloud Security
Meta whistleblower testimony will push US closer to an online safety bill 
He explained that Meta could quite easily build a button so young people could report such issues, but this hasn’t happened in part because there’s “no transparency about the harms that teenagers are experiencing on Instagram.”
Social Media
Orca Security teams with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI for automated code generation
The integration is part of an expanded partnership between Orca and Google LLC to provide organizations with an intelligent security assistant to rapidly generate remediation code for identified risks. The assistant also has lower skill thresholds, allowing for enhanced productivity and for security professionals to quickly and efficiently secure cloud assets at scale.
Automation & Productivity
Google turns to regulators to make Apple open up iMessage
Being designated as a “core platform service” would be significant for iMessage, as it could compel Apple to make it interoperable with other messaging services.
Automation & Productivity
Palo Alto Networks unveils new zero-trust management solution, security features and next-gen firewalls 
Strata Cloud Manager bolsters security posture and proactively prevents network disruptions at every enforcement point. Security teams using it can ensure continuous network uptime, with predictive analytics helping organizations proactively anticipate capacity bottlenecks and assess deployment health up to seven days ahead.
Security
NetApp sets up all-flash SME reseller deal with Fujitsu virtualized servers
Under the arrangement, Japan’s Fujitsu will punt its Primergy servers to small and medium enterprise customers, alongside VMware’s vSphere and NetApp’s storage hardware and software. The systems will be sold by the sales channel for all three vendors.
Data Storage
Cloud spend skyrocketing? Meet the AI startup that’s slashing these costs in half
At the core, the offering can be described as an all-in-one platform that utilizes advanced ML algorithms and heuristics to automatically optimize Kubernetes clusters while providing full visibility and insights into how the resources are provisioned.
Cloud
VMware will have different object storage integrations with MinIO and NetApp
NetApp announced StorageGRID for VMware Sovereign Cloud using a plugin for VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension. This enables sovereign cloud customers to store, secure, protect, and preserve unstructured data while meeting global data privacy and residency regulations. The integration delivers StorageGRID services within the familiar VMware Cloud Director user interface.
Data Storage
SUSE’s Rancher updates help with cloud-native environments
At Kubecon, SUSE announced a new version of its upstream open-source Rancher project as well as a new release of the enterprise edition known as Rancher Prime. Alongside the Rancher updates, SUSE also issued the latest iteration of its SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Micro Linux distribution designed for containers and virtualization.
Cloud
Frontegg Forward is here, allowing enterprises to securely manage their customers’ digital identities
Since its founding in 2019, Frontegg has sought to streamline this end user identity management process for its enterprise customers, and now with Frontegg Forward, it plans to make doing so even easier — requiring literally no programming or developer knowledge to get set up and running.
Security
Kinsing Cyberattackers Debut 'Looney Tunables' Cloud Exploits
"The Looney Tunables vulnerability presents an urgent and severe security risk with widespread implications across millions of Linux systems," he said in an emailed statement. "The active exploitation by the Kinsing threat actor, known for their aggressive attacks on cloud infrastructures, heightens the threat level."
Security
IBM launches $500M fund to invest in enterprise AI startups 
Through its Enterprise AI Venture Fund, IBM intends to back “early-stage to hyper-growth” startups. Axios reported that the company will place a particular emphasis on startups with products optimized for specific industries or use cases. According to the publication, IBM will avoid backing emerging AI providers that directly compete with existing portfolio companies.
Artificial Intelligence
Ironscales targets image-based email security threats with new machine learning capabilities 
The Ironscales Fall 2023 release introduces sophisticated machine learning protections tailored to counter image-based threats, as well as automation features for phishing simulation testing. The threats covered by the update include protection from “quishing,” or QR code phishing, business email compromise and image-based attacks that bypass conventional language processing defenses.
Security
Microsoft adds a ton of new features to Azure Kubernetes Service to make it more efficient, scalable and secure 
In announcing today’s updates, Microsoft explained that because efficiency is a major concern for Kubernetes users in the current macroeconomic environment, it has put a lot of effort into making AKS more resource efficient. Those efforts are visible now with the general availability of kube-reserved resource optimization in AKS, which helps improve its resource reservation algorithms to deliver a reduction of up to 20% in required memory.
Cloud
Mobile users to get Aadhar-like ID for SIM, move will enhance cybersecurity, streamline services
The DoT is all set to roll out a new initiative that will issue a unique customer ID to all mobile subscribers with SIMs. In theory, this should prevent misusing Aadhar and other KYC norms and will also ensure that people are not able to buy fraudulent numbers.
Security
VMware Collaborates with Intel to Unlock Private AI Everywhere
VMware and Intel are working to deliver a jointly validated AI stack that will enable customers to use their existing general-purpose VMware and Intel infrastructure and open source software to simplify building and deploying AI models.
Artificial Intelligence
YouTube is now testing experimental generative AI features on content
The most interesting item in this bag of tricks is ‘YouChat,” which YouTube said will help viewers “dive deeper into the content they are watching.” Starting today, a select number of users will be able to open a YouTube AI bot that will answer questions about the content being watched and offer recommendations for related content.
Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI is letting anyone create their own version of ChatGPT
In the coming weeks, these AI agents, which OpenAI is calling GPTs, will be accessible through the GPT Store. Details about how the store will look and work are scarce for now, though OpenAI is promising to eventually pay creators an unspecified amount based on how much their GPTs are used. GPTs will be available to paying ChatGPT Plus subscribers and OpenAI enterprise customers, who can make internal-only GPTs for their employees.
ChatGPT
OMNIVISION Introduces 16:10 Aspect Ratio, 5.2MP-Resolution Image Sensor for Laptops and IoT Devices
OMNIVISION, a leading global developer of semiconductor solutions, including advanced digital imaging, analog, and touch & display technology, announced the 5.2-megapixel (MP) OV05C10 image sensor, the first product specially developed for 16:10 aspect ratio notebooks. The sensor has staggered high dynamic range (HDR) and is suitable for mainstream and high-end laptops, tablets and IoT devices.
Automation & Productivity
SUSE’s Rancher updates help with cloud-native environments
At Kubecon, SUSE announced a new version of its upstream open-source Rancher project as well as a new release of the enterprise edition known as Rancher Prime. Alongside the Rancher updates, SUSE also issued the latest iteration of its SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Micro Linux distribution designed for containers and virtualization.
Cloud
Rescale Announces Cloud File System for Automated Fast, Parallel Storage to Power Secure Collaboration in Applied AI and R&D Computing
Rescale Cloud File System brings automation and policy-based control to the latest high performance cloud-based storage technologies for turnkey deployment and simplified management. Rescale Cloud File System automates file systems from a variety of leading cloud storage providers such as Microsoft Azure Managed Lustre, ensuring users and their applications have fast, parallel access to data while balancing cost and performance objectives.
Data Storage
IBM’s new cloud-native QRadar SIEM was made for multicloud challenges
In April of this year, IBM announced an updated QRadar security suite combining extended detection and response (XDR), security orchestration automation and response (SOAR) and artificial intelligence (AI) with SIEM. The new, cloud-native QRadar SIEM provides a different approach to deploying and scaling the technology, as well as providing even better visibility into hybrid environments.
Security
Controversy brews over new EU-based digital certificate laws that could compromise digital trust relationships 
They point out that web browsing is a global ecosystem, not just bounded by the EU. This new amendment to eDIAS, they say, could create all sorts of abuse “by governments that do not aspire to the same governance principles as the EU. For instance, the same mechanism can be used to insert a government root certificate, and thereby gain access to all browser sessions secured with those certificates.”
Security
Extreme Networks rolls out Universal ZTNA, paving the way for SASE
“A lot of our competitors have NAC solutions, have ZTNA solutions, or have both, but they’ve not actually combined them into a single solution,” DeBacker said. “So if you look at Cisco, Juniper [Networks], [HPE] Aruba, all of those do have those solutions, but there’s multiple parts and pieces that make it very difficult.”
Security
New Generative AI From Amazon
This approach benefits marketers of all sizes, helping those without in-house resources or agency backing to more readily generate brand-themed images while also assisting larger firms in their pursuit of streamlined creative creation processes. The picture-generating feature is straightforward to use and requires no technological skill.
Automation & Productivity
CAST AI raises $35M in new funding and launches new Kubernetes optimization features at KubeCon 
Founded in 2019, CAST AI offers a cloud optimization platform that is claimed to cut cloud bills in half for Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure customers. The platform uses artificial intelligence to analyze multiple data points to find an optimal cost-performance ratio, optimizing them in minutes.
Cloud
Cyera Delivers Automated Remediations Extending Data Security Posture Management to Security Operations
Cyera’s dynamic and agile remediation capabilities address a significant challenge for security teams. According to a recent report1, 97% of security teams struggle to apply proactive security due to remediation inefficiencies. Additionally, many organizations grapple with robust security processes and audit requirements that make automated remediation challenging, if not impossible.
Security
Red Hat Device Edge Is Now Generally Available
Red Hat Device Edge provides a consistent platform designed for resource-constrained environments which require small form factor compute at the device edge, including Internet of Things (IoT) gateways, industrial controllers, smart displays, point of sales terminals, vending machines, robots and more.
Edge Computing
01.AI, led by AI pioneer Kai-Fu Lee, achieves $1B+ valuation in eight months 
The company’s first product is an open-source neural network called Yi-34B. It’s a large language model with 34 billion parameters that can process text in English and Chinese. In a recent benchmark test carried out by Hugging Face Inc., YI-34B outperformed a number of competing open-source models with significantly higher parameter counts.
Artificial Intelligence
Cloud storage pusher Volumez talks up ‘age of OpEx’
Volumez has developed a cloud-delivered block storage provisioning service for containerized applications. Storage features such as performance, resiliency and security are specified by customer’s declarative input. Volumez provisions the data path to local on-premises or raw public cloud storage services, such as Amazon EC2 Instance Store, Google Compute Local SSDs, and Azure Ephemeral OS Disks.
Data Storage
AppMap integrates code visualization and runtime analysis tools with GitHub
AppMap’s diagrams are created automatically by software that follows each user’s interactions with the application and analyzes the resulting code execution. They show the relationships between the different parts of code, including functions, classes, data structures and the flow of data between them. In addition, AppMap provides features for analyzing and debugging applications, helping to track variable values and view the call stack during code execution.
DevOps
VMware product blitz highlighted by data services and Cloud Foundation enhancements 
The VMware Data Services Manager gives IT administrators policy-based native infrastructure management while data teams and database administrators retain autonomy over data policies. The first two strategic partnerships for Data Services Manager are support for Google LLC’s AlloyDB Omni offering on the Google Cloud Platform and MinIO Inc.’s Object Store.
Data Management
VMware, Google team up to deliver PostgreSQL-compatible database for AI development
“Think of Alloy as PostgreSQL on steroids. It’s up to two times faster on transactions and 100 times faster on analytics. It has vector search and a lot of integrations with the open-source ecosystem.”
Data & Analytics
Replit CEO details path to artificial developer intelligence, raises new $20M investment
Replit’s coding LLM technology competes against multiple rival technologies such as Github Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer and open source efforts like StarCoder and the Code Llama project.
Artificial Intelligence
Microsoft unveils ‘LeMa’: A revolutionary AI learning method mirroring human problem solving
“Consider a human student who failed to solve a math problem, he will learn from what mistake he has made and how to correct it,” the authors explained. They then applied this concept to LLMs, using mistake-correction data pairs generated by GPT-4 to fine-tune them.
Artificial Intelligence
Orca Security Announces Generative AI Integration With Amazon Bedrock
The integration helps organizations significantly accelerate their Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) by delivering turnkey remediations with automatic code generation. By leveraging Amazon Bedrock, Orca effectively operates as a security co-pilot, boosting efficiency and lowering the skill thresholds needed for cloud security professionals.
Security
IBM unveils Storage Scale System 6000 for AI workloads
He said he sees Storage Scale and the 6000 as the top end of an information supply chain that collects data from multiple sources, consolidating workloads, and pumps it out to GPU servers for AI training and inferencing.
Data Storage
Mural Announces Integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI-Powered Collaboration Features for Enterprise Teams
Mural is one of the first integrations with Microsoft 365 Copilot which became generally available (GA) and is the only visual collaboration solution in the initial set of third-party integrations being offered. Alongside this integration, Mural is launching Mural AI, which includes the AI-powered features: actions, mind maps, and clustering.
Automation & Productivity
Microsoft launches internal initiative to make its products more secure 
The first priority of the Secure Future Initiative is to reduce the occurrence of vulnerabilities in Microsoft products. To that end, the company will have its developers increase their use of memory-safe programming languages such as Java, C# and Python. Code written in such languages is less susceptible to certain types of bugs that can be used by hackers to steal data.
Security
Fermyon First to Deliver Secure-By-Default Software Supply Chain for Serverless Apps
With the integration of the WebAssembly (Wasm) Component Model, Spin 2.0 allows developers to implement software components written in multiple languages; makes available untrusted, third-party components that are, by definition, secure; and offers secure-by-default software supply chains.
Security
Nebulon’s Medusa2 DPU casts snake eyes at enterprise server fleet customers
Nebulon has ported its niche server-management card functionality to an OEM Nvidia BlueField 3-based data processing unit (DPU) and so become a fully-fledged DPU supplier – offloading security, networking, storage and management functions from server host CPUs.
Data Management
Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search adds new enterprise-ready generative AI features 
Using Vertex AI Search, which was made generally available in August, developers can quickly create conversational chatbot search applications that would have taken weeks in mere days or hours and use large language model AI capabilities to enable information discovery at large scale. Essentially it brings a better search experience to customers or internal employees by taking what would have been a simple keyword search and turning it into a conversational experience.
Artificial Intelligence
Commvault dives into cyber-resilience
The subscription customer count is now 7,800, more than 50 percent of Commvault’s customer base – up 500 sequentially and 2,200 annually. More than 60 percent of Metallic customers are new to Commvault and only about 25 percent of Metallic users are customers for Commvault’s enterprise protection products, we’re told.
Data Management
Mint is shutting down, and it’s pushing users toward Credit Karma
Mint, the budgeting app owned by Intuit, is shutting down. Intuit announced on Tuesday that Mint will get absorbed into Intuit’s other service, Credit Karma, when it officially goes away on January 1st, 2024 (via Bloomberg). But it’s still not clear whether Credit Karma will get the budgeting features that Mint is known for.
Automation & Productivity
With RAGStack, DataStax enables generative AI models to gain additional context from third-party data 
It’s described as an “out-of-the-box RAG solution” that aims to simplify a technique known as retrieval augmented generation. RAG, as it’s known, refers to the process of providing additional context from outside data sources to enable more accurate query responses from large language models, improving the performance of generative AI applications.
Data & Analytics
Honeycomb Unveils Kubernetes-Aware Observability to Solve Application Performance Mysteries
According to CNCF’s 2022 Annual Survey, 64 percent of end users (engineers) have implemented Kubernetes in production today, and 25 percent are currently evaluating the solution. Kubernetes is furthering its momentum as the preferred environment for managing containerized applications, as it’s easier to get feature changes provisioned and enables developers to build and release faster.
Automation & Productivity
BMC Revolutionizes Observability and AIOps With BMC HelixGPT
The BMC Helix Operations Management solution transforms IT operations with out-of-the-box service blueprints for dynamic service modeling, easy-to-read situation explainability, and situation fingerprinting to remember similar situations. It also improved deep container auto-detection for an in-depth understanding of containerized environments.
IT Management
Roots Automation Unveils Revolutionary New Autonomous Workforce Platform
The Roots Autonomous Workforce Platform uses proprietary computer vision and powerful language-to-action AI that allows a user to provide an instruction using spoken word or typed text, then generates a fully connected series of steps, a ‘Flow,’ for a Digital Coworker to run across any combination of insurance documents, systems and processes.
Automation & Productivity
West Monroe Introduces Nigel, an Internal AI-Powered Platform
The most exciting feature at launch is its Prompt Library which houses pre-populated prompts to take the guesswork out of good prompting specific to tasks performed by West Monroe employees—enabling faster workflows across the firm’s entire employee population. The tool also has crowdsourced functionality, encouraging anyone to submit prompts for addition to the library.
Automation & Productivity
HubSpot announces plans to acquire business data provider Clearbit 
Over time, the company has built up its platform to support even more types of data that give businesses a better understanding of their potential customers and their intent. It gathers public data from the web and its own proprietary data and uses large language model AI to convert unstructured information into insights that can be then delivered to marketers and operations to target their interests.
Marketing Tech
Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM genAI is a language model aimed at developers
Most enterprises can expect to immediately see the benefits of this AI tool, particularly in terms of “how fast their teams can write automation and build trust in that automation — and their own skills,” he said. The service also supports best practices and organization-wide code maintenance for consistent automation.
DevOps
Salesforce Launched MuleSoft’s Anypoint Code Builder
Developers can use the Anypoint Code Builder IDE to create APIs and integrations with cutting-edge tools in Visual Studio Code, generate code with the help of natural language prompts, and deploy their projects to a selection of environments, including those in the cloud.
DevOps
French serverless platform startup Koyeb raises $7M 
Founded in Paris in 2020, Koyeb offers a serverless platform that provides developers and businesses with a fast way to run applications, application programming interfaces and databases and manage workers globally through high-performance micro-virtual machines. The platform is programming language-agnostic and supports several deployment options: git-based deployments, deployments via a Docker file and deployments via any container registry.
Automation & Productivity
Siemens and Microsoft Partner to Drive Cross-Industry AI Adoption
In addition, the launch of the integration between Siemens Teamcenter software for product lifecycle management and Microsoft Teams will further pave the way to enabling the industrial metaverse. It will simplify virtual collaboration of design engineers, frontline workers, and other teams across business functions.
Automation & Productivity
China, US, and EU agree to work together on AI safety
“We are especially concerned by such risks in domains such as cybersecurity and biotechnology, as well as where frontier AI systems may amplify risks such as disinformation. There is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these AI models,” the agreement read.
Artificial Intelligence
Beacon Embeddedworks High-Performance i.mx 8M Plus SOM – Ready to Drive Embedded AI/ML Applications
The Zoom™ Development Kit includes an i.MX 8M Plus SOM, baseboard, power supply, microSD card, and all necessary cables. Fully tested and pre-certified, this SOM is ideal for demanding applications where small size, reliability and regulatory compliance are essential and the Zoom™ Dev Kit makes developing applications quick and easy.
DevOps
Box announces Vertex-powered generative AI tools to process and analyze documents faster 
The metadata extraction feature will be available via an application programming interface first of all and will come to Box Enterprise Plus plan users in beta test mode next year. In a nutshell, it provides a way for customers to understand their key data within Box more easily without digging through it manually. For instance, users will be able automatically to classify and label documents at large scale in order to dig up key insights, such as which contracts are close to expiration or which invoices must be paid by the end of the month.
Automation & Productivity
Red Hat applies IBM watsonx code generation to Ansible automation
The generative AI capabilities should be transparent to users, Jones said. When they create and edit Ansible Playbooks and rules, they can input a text prompt and receive an output that’s translated into YAML (which stands for YAML Ain’t Markup Language) code. Lightspeed with Watsonx also has the collateral benefit of supporting best practices in automation development and maintenance, Jones said
Automation & Productivity
Secure cloud access startup P0 Security raises $5M and launches flagship product 
Founded in 2022, P0 Security helps security engineers secure cloud access and entitlements for their developers. The product can be used to identify which cloud identities — human or machine — have privileged access, with support for granular, just-in-time and short-lived privileged access granting.
Security
1up emerges from stealth with $2.5M for sales AI that answers customer objections, fills out RFPs
“At 1up, we’re interested in how this technology can be used to automate knowledge. We believe there’s a whole new level of productivity that can be unlocked by accelerating the flow of information across the enterprise.”
Automation & Productivity
Generative AI is at the heart of a slew of Snowflake announcements 
In a bid to simplify the development of AI models, the company is unveiling a private preview of Snowflake Cortex, a managed service that’s said to make it easier for organizations to discover, analyze and build AI applications in the Snowflake Data Cloud. Cortex provides access to serverless functions that include Meta Platforms Inc.’s Llama 2 large language model as well as task-specific models and advanced vector search functionality.
Artificial Intelligence
Cowbell gets $25M more to keep growing like gangbusters
At a high-level, Cowbell’s adaptive cyber insurance aligns cyber insurance coverage and pricing with an organization’s evolving cyber risk profile through continuous, automated risk assessment, incentives for risk reduction, and closed-loop risk management.
Risk Management
Orca Security deepens integration with AWS through Amazon Bedrock support 
The integration between Orca Security and Amazon Bedrock has been designed to help organizations significantly accelerate their mean time to resolution, or MTTR, by delivering turnkey remediations with automatic code generation. Through leveraging Amazon Bedrock, Orca operates as a security copilot, boosting efficiency for cloud security professionals.
Cloud Security
Exclusive: Stability AI brings advanced 3D and image fine-tuning to Stable Diffusion
The most notable enhancement is the brand new Stable 3D model. Until now, Stable Diffusion has primarily worked on two-dimensional (2D) image generation. The Stable 3D model will change that, providing functionality that could help with any type of 3D content creation, including graphic design and even video game development.
Automation & Productivity
LinkedIn launches an AI chatbot to coach people on getting a new job
LinkedIn said it will act as a “job seeker coach” among other AI-powered tools for its premium members. The new feature is powered by GPT-4, the same generative AI large language model that underlies OpenAI LP’s chatbot ChatGPT, which uses LinkedIn’s vast knowledge base of data of more than 67 million employers.
Artificial Intelligence
Canva launches AI tools for education
Among the AI tools is “Magic Write,” a generative AI tool that allows students and teachers to access quick actions from a dropdown menu, including summarizing text, expanding short text into longer formats, rewriting text, changing the tone and more.
EdTech
YouTube is getting serious about blocking ad blockers
If you run into YouTube’s block, you may see a notice that says “video playback is blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled.” It also includes a prompt to allow ads or try YouTube Premium. You may get prompts about YouTube’s stance on ad blockers but still be able to watch a video, though, for one Verge staffer, YouTube now fully blocks them nearly every time.
Automation & Productivity
Hardfin Introduces First Technology To Enable Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) Companies To Automate Contract-To-Cash Cycle
Control Center’s powerful automations are enabled by Hardfin’s dynamic linking of assets and contracts. Hardfin is the first software to manage hardware financial operations with linked assets, which makes it possible to track the full lifecycle of hardware subscriptions.
Automation & Productivity
Cisco and Aviz coordinate support for enterprise SONiC networks
Under the partnership, Cisco’s 8000 series routers will be available with Aviz Networks’ SONiC management software and 24/7 support. The support aspect of the agreement may be the most significant portion of the partnership, as both companies attempt to assuage customers’ anxiety about supporting an open-source NOS.
Network Management
Google DeepMind debuts new version of its AlphaFold model for researchers
The Google LLC unit says the latest iteration of the model provides more accurate data about proteins’ structure than its predecessor. Furthermore, AlphaFold can now study a broader range of biological molecules. DeepMind believes that the model’s enhanced capabilities could help advance research in areas such as drug discovery.
Emerging Tech
Oxide on-prem cloud computer reinvents the server rack
The Oxide cloud computer combines compute, storage, and networking elements as sleds in a plug-and-play rack. It includes the open source software needed to build, run, and operate a cloud-like infrastructure.
Cloud
US, dozens of allies pledge not to pay ransomware hackers 
According to Bleeping Computer, some of the countries that participate in the International Counter-Ransomware Initiative haven’t yet signed the pledge to avoid paying ransomware demands. It’s believed that the commitment will only apply to cyberattacks that target government networks. TechCrunch reported that the commitment “stops short of banning” companies from making ransom payments.
Security
Mistral, a generative AI startup aiming to be Europe’s OpenAI, seeks $300 million in new funding
Mensch, Mistral’s CEO and a former DeepMind research scientist said the company’s mission is to “construct the next generation of AI systems capable of solving real-world problems.” He added that the new funding will be used to expand the team, accelerate research and development efforts, and establish new offices across Europe and the United States
Artificial Intelligence
Google Dynamic Search Ads Abused to Unleash Malware 'Deluge'
"In most ads that I see for malicious software downloads, the content matches the title. So the threat actor actually goes through the effort of creating an ad from scratch: they use a compromised advertiser account, and they create the ad with a matching URL, a matching description, and all that wasn't the case here. So I thought: Why would somebody create a title that doesn't match the description?" Segura recalls.
Security
Dell Technologies and Meta to Drive Generative AI Innovation with Llama 2 On Premises
The collaboration simplifies the on-premises AI environment by bringing together Dell’s top-selling infrastructure portfolio and the Llama 2 family of AI models. Customers can accelerate their GenAI efforts on premises in a traditional data center or at edge locations. Dell has integrated Meta’s Llama 2 models into its system sizing tools to help guide customers to the right solution to power their Llama 2 based AI efforts.
Artificial Intelligence
Embratel Launches Platform to Drive Digital Transformation in the Field
The platform includes high-resolution satellite imagery services, weather stations, telemetry, soil sampling, data processing with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, data management application, as well as support and customized training for farmers.
Automation & Productivity
VA launches tech sprint for health care innovation required by AI executive order
The VA’s new artificial intelligence tech sprint is meant to encourage American innovators to create AI-centered tools to aid in clinicians’ note-taking and/or integrate patients’ medical records.
Automation & Productivity
Microsoft and Octopai to Co-Sell Leading Innovative Data Management Integration
“For Microsoft customers undergoing a cloud transformation, Octopai’s data lineage emerges as a critical component ensuring business continuity, offering a seamless, insightful, and secure transition. As we step into this enriched partnership, our focus remains steadfast on empowering businesses with unparalleled insights and analytics, driving data-driven decision-making to unprecedented heights.”
Data Management
Weav.ai emerges from stealth with a series of ‘copilots’ for analyzing unstructured data
The company’s Enterprise AI Copilots come in three versions for document, conversation and search, with a pre-integrated AI infrastructure stack that combines integrations, prompt management, foundation models, vector databases, security and monitoring, the company said.
Data & Analytics
Linux 6.6 brings new scheduler, file sharing and security
Since the creation of Linux over two decades ago, SMB support has been largely implemented in subsystems of Linux that are adjacent to the main Linux kernel. For the past two years, Linux has been experimenting with an implementation of the SMBv3 protocol directly inside the Linux kernel that it calls KSMBD. The promise of KSMBD is a more optimized, faster and secure approach to sharing files over a network.
Automation & Productivity
Confirmed: Palo Alto Networks buys Dig Security, sources say for $400M
As we have previously reported, Dig’s focus is data security posture management. Specifically it helps understand where an organization's assets reside across the cloud -- or more likely a mix of cloud environments -- providing a picture to security teams both to help understand what is moving where, but also what to lock down (and where) in the event of a breach.
Security
G7 introduces voluntary AI code of conduct
“We… stress the innovative opportunities and transformative potential of advanced AI systems, in particular, foundation models and generative AI,” the G7 said in a statement issued today. “We also recognize the need to manage risks and to protect individuals, society and our shared principles, including the rule of law and democratic values, keeping humankind at the center.”
Artificial Intelligence
Meta is offering ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram to keep EU regulators at bay 
Starting in November, users in the 27 countries of the EU, as well as in Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, will know what it feels like to scroll through the platforms while not being inundated with often-annoying ads. The cost will be 9.99 euros ($11) a month on the web or 12.99 euros ($14) a month on iOS and Android, a little bit less than the ad-free option X Corp. recently announced for all its customers.
Social Media
LogRhythm teams up with D3 Security for enhanced incident response automation 
Key benefits of this partnership include rapid cross-stack response, with LogRhythm Axon SIEM able to trigger automated response actions and alerts orchestrated by D3 Smart SOAR, ensuring rapid incident resolutions. Automated alert triage and enrichment deliver incident response workflows that are automated, removing repetitive manual tasks like data enrichment and correlation.
Security
Google Maps gets a major AI boost in new update, here’s what’s new
This includes improvements to the EV charging station feature, which is a boon for electric vehicle users. Additionally, users can now expect more precise recommendations for nearby activities and a deeper level of visualization. One notable aspect of these upgrades is the integration of radiance fields, an AI subset that facilitates the creation of a 3D scene using 2D images.
Automation & Productivity
Hitachi Vantara gives birth to AI-led Digital Services unit
Its product portfolio includes the VSP (Virtual Storage Platform) high-end and mid-range block arrays, HNAS file storage, VSS (software-defined storage), and HCP (Hitachi Content Platform) for object data. These standalone products are being combined into a single hybrid storage platform called Virtual Storage Platform One, managed through the Ops Center product.
Data Storage
ChatGPT Plus members can upload and analyze files in the latest beta
Subscribers have reported that the update includes the ability to upload files and work with them, as well as multimodal support. Basically, users won’t have to select modes like Browse with Bing from the GPT-4 dropdown — it will instead guess what they want based on context.
ChatGPT
Midjourney, Stability AI and DeviantArt win a victory in copyright case by artists — but the fight continues
Orrick spends the rest of his ruling explaining why he found the artists’ complaint defective, which includes various issues, but the big one being that two of the artists — McKernan and Ortiz, did not actually file copyrights on their art with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Artificial Intelligence
Niantic announces major 3.0 release for its Lightship AR developer platform 
The platform uses location-based technology that can identify local spaces that allows developers to easily track and place objects using visual and mapping positioning. This means that when they develop a game or an application, the app can always keep track of a virtual object or element wherever it is in the world. Now with support for the Unity graphics and game engine, and cross-platform support for Android and iOS devices, developers can reach even more users.
AR
Data storage supplier Western Digital to split into two companies 
“Moving forward, as we progress through fiscal year 2024, we see an improving market environment in both businesses, and we will remain open to strategic opportunities that unlock further value in both our HDD and Flash investments and assets.”
Data Storage
Sysdig Debuts New Benchmark for Cloud Detection and Response
Sysdig, the leader in cloud security powered by runtime insights released at SANS CyberFest 2023 the 5/5/5 Benchmark for Cloud Detection and Response, a new framework that outlines how quickly organizations should detect, triage, and respond to attacks in the cloud.
Security
Immuta’s new product aims to streamline data management and regulatory compliance 
Called Immuta Discover, the new product enables data teams to establish and maintain highly accurate metadata for data access control, monitoring and regulatory compliance. The product automatically and continuously discovers structured data in cloud data platforms and also leverages existing metadata pulled from enterprise data catalogs.
Data Management
ZeroRISC raises $5M to deliver commercial OpenTitan-based cloud security for chips
ZeroRISC provides fabrication-to-field cloud security services that couple tightly with the OpenTitan open-source root of trust design. These start from initial configuration and identity creation, extending to secure ownership transfer and in-field device and platform update and management.
Security
OpenAI readying team to prevent AI from starting a nuclear war
The new team, according to the company, is expected to connect capability assessment, evaluations, and internal red teaming for frontier models, from the models it develops in the near future to those with Artificial General Intelligence-level capabilities.
Artificial Intelligence
WiMi Is Researching Generative Adversarial Network-based Hologram Generation
Currently, GAN-based hologram generation is mainly used in virtual reality, augmented reality and other fields. In the future, WiMi will be expanded to more application fields, such as applying it to medicine, engineering design, literary and artistic creation and other fields, providing more possibilities for these fields.
Emerging Tech
FTC to Require More Data Breach Reporting, Security Plan
The agency’s Safeguards Rule now requires non-banking financial institutions like mortgage brokers, car dealers, accountants, investment advisers, and payday lenders to develop and maintain a comprehensive security program to keep customer data secure. The amendment strengthens changes made to the Safeguards Rule in 2021.
Privacy & Security
Bloomfire Redefines Enterprise Knowledge Management with Advanced AI Features
AI Author Assist brings speed and efficiency to content creators by simplifying the time-intensive process of writing and refining high-quality, actionable posts. Authors can build summaries, key takeaways, and insights from their original work using a suite of generative AI tools with cutting-edge prompt engineering.
Automation & Productivity
Biden releases AI executive order directing agencies to develop safety guidelines
The order has eight goals: to create new standards for AI safety and security, protect privacy, advance equity and civil rights, stand up for consumers, patients, and students, support workers, promote innovation and competition, advance US leadership in AI technologies, and ensure the responsible and effective government use of the technology.
Artificial Intelligence
WiMi Is Researching Generative Adversarial Network-based Hologram Generation
Currently, GAN-based hologram generation is mainly used in virtual reality, augmented reality and other fields. In the future, WiMi will be expanded to more application fields, such as applying it to medicine, engineering design, literary and artistic creation and other fields, providing more possibilities for these fields.
Emerging Tech
Blueprint Prep Introduces the First and Only AI-Powered MCAT Tutor
The AI chatbot, named Blue, is the first of its kind in the MCAT test preparation market. It is equipped to provide students with personalized guidance on how to tackle CARS questions through genuine one-on-one conversations while adapting in real-time to their individual learning needs.
Automation & Productivity
Nvidia backs $99M round for laser-powered 3D metal printing startup Seurat 
Seurat’s 3D printers are designed to manufacture metal products such as wind turbine parts. According to the company, its machines are powered by optical technology that was originally developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to support fusion research. Seurat claims that its equipment can produce metal products faster than competing systems and with more fine-grained features.
Sustainability
Acorn Labs Launches New Service Making Cloud Computing More Accessible
Acorn offers a free sandbox environment where users can deploy software for up to two hours at a time, as often as they like. Users can experiment with innovative technologies, learn how containers and server software work, and easily share their creations, all without cost barriers. This free plan is designed so even someone with little experience can launch a cloud application as easily as they install an app on their phone
Cloud
Hollywood strike provides window for cyber criminals to target streaming users 
In one example, recipients received a phone scam phishing email impersonating Paramount+ that claims an automatic renewal of a subscription will be processed. All the emails originated from AOL free email accounts, which have a high sender reputation, so they are able to pass email authentication.
Security
Cyber Security and Insurance Platform Upfort Raises $8 Million in Series A Funding
Upfort revolutionizes how cyber risk is assessed and managed, empowering insurers and brokers to dramatically reduce their clients’ exposure to cyber attacks. In fact, in a recent 18-month study of a leading cyber insurance program, policyholders that fully implemented Upfort Shield saw significantly fewer security breaches and claims, with the likelihood of filing a claim decreasing by 80%.
Security
Predii Introduces Generative AI ‘Co-Pilot’ for Automotive Service and Repair Businesses
Predii 360 is designed to integrate optimally with custom service and repair data. Models are hosted in an isolated environment, protecting intellectual property, and enabling companies to innovate and commercialize new solutions using Generative AI.
Automation & Productivity
5/5/5 security benchmark from Sysdig aims to speed up incident response times
 Dubbed the “5/5/5 Benchmark for Cloud Detection and Response,” the goal is to get organizations to be able to detect threats in 5 seconds, investigate and correlate alerts within 5 minutes, and respond to confirmed attacks in 5 minutes after the correlation phase.
Security
Apple’s Journal app is kind of smart — and kind of basic
When you’re creating a journal entry, you can add photos and video, record a voice memo, or log a location associated with your entry. When you’re looking at the timeline, you can filter to see only the entries with photos, or the extra-special entries you’ve bookmarked, but that’s about it.
Automation & Productivity
How the National Archives is using AI to make records more accessible in the digital age
The National Archives is training an AI bot to extract the DD-214 forms that summarize a person’s military record from large digital files, freeing up staff to work on more complicated requests.
Automation & Productivity
Poe wants to be the App Store of conversational AI, will pay chatbot creators
Poe, the multi-AI chatbot aggregator launched by Quora in late 2022, has built up a following by giving users a single interface for accessing multiple competing large language models (LLMs) including OpenAI’s GPT-3.5/4, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s PaLM 2, and Meta’s Llama 2. In April, Poe opened the door to third-party creators, be they individuals or enterprises and organizations, to create their own chatbots within its platform using its supported LLMs.
Artificial Intelligence
Newly discovered ‘iLeakage’ exploits speculative execution in Apple devices 
Dubbed “iLeakage,” the vulnerability exploits a “speculative execution” vulnerability in Safari installed on recent model Macs, iPads and iPhones with Apple A and M series CPUs. Speculative execution is a technique that modern processors use to improve performance by executing instructions before it is known whether they are actually necessary. Doing so can lead to security vulnerabilities if the speculative execution is not properly controlled.
Security
Fortinet unveils new SASE appliance, taps Google Cloud for PoP expansion
For example, the FortiGate 120G SASE appliance delivers 3 Gb/s of SSL inspection, which is six times faster than the industry average for visibility into encrypted traffic at scale, while it also can provide 13 times more firewall throughput compared to the industry average, and can run 54 times as many concurrent sessions as the industry average, he touted.
Security
Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank
“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk said, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Verge. “If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”
Social Media
Generative AI training data sets are now trackable – and often legally complicated
The idea is to provide a way to explore the sometimes murky world of training data used to develop generative AI. In an official statement announcing the Data Provenance Explorer, the team behind it described a “data transparency crisis” that could complicate the development and commercial use of generative AI systems.
Artificial Intelligence
Microsoft: 0ktapus Cyberattackers Evolve to 'Most Dangerous' Status
"We observed Octo Tempest leverage a diverse array of tactics to navigate complex hybrid environments, exfiltrate sensitive data, and encrypt data," according to the report, which delves into the granular details of 0ktapus' arsenal. "Octo Tempest leverages tradecraft that many organizations don't have in their typical threat models. The well-organized, prolific nature of Octo Tempest's attacks is indicative of extensive technical depth and multiple hands-on-keyboard operators."
Security
Threads isn’t dead and it now has polls and GIFs too
Meta’s X rival, Instagram Threads, is copying a couple more X features today with the launch of support for polls and GIFs. The update comes in rapid succession to other releases for the new app, which have included support for a web version, a (free) edit button, profile switching, likes, full-text search, a chronological feed, voice posts, and more.
Social Media
Grammarly Defies the AI Hype With Significant Business Impact, Deepens AI Support for Enterprises
Personalized voice detection and application, addressing the problem of AI-generated text sounding robotic or impersonal. Grammarly will automatically detect a user’s unique writing style and create a personal voice profile describing how they sound to their audiences. They can then rewrite any generated text in their voice with one click. Grammarly continuously adapts to the user’s preferences over time, capturing elements such as tone and stylistic choices. The capabilities will roll out to all Grammarly Business customers by year’s end.
Automation & Productivity
Generative AI is Coming to Robots, Courtesy of NVIDIA
NVIDIA has developed a variety of tutorials, guides, and samples to facilitate the use of popular generative AI models. While many NVIDIA customers – including tech giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cisco, and Siemens – are integrating Jetson into their operations, NVIDIA introduced the Jetson Generative AI Lab to supercharge AI app development. The new software offers developers access to state-of-the-art open-source generative AI models.
Artificial Intelligence
Slingshot Brings Operational Data to the Center of Employees’ Most Common Projects and Processes with Ready-to-Use Workflows
Companies can connect Slingshot’s dashboard templates to leading data sources including Google Ads, HubSpot, QuickBooks and Salesforce to quickly generate visual snapshots and make informed decisions with data.
Automation & Productivity
Intel backs $44M round for private cloud infrastructure startup Oxide Computer 
Oxide sells a data center appliance called the Oxide Cloud Computer that combines compute, storage and network equipment in a single package. There’s also onboard management software. The system is designed to provide a similar user experience as the public cloud: administrators can perform tasks such as provisioning new virtual machines with a few clicks in a visual interface.
Cloud
Datasaur launches LLM Lab to help enterprises build custom ChatGPT-like applications
Available for both cloud and on-premise deployments, the Lab gives enterprises a starting point to build their internal custom generative AI applications without worrying about business and data privacy risks that often stem from third-party services. It also gives teams more control over their projects.
ChatGPT
Groq Unveils New Low Latency LPU System at SC23, Paving the Way for Future AI Applications
“Groq’s groundbreaking speed, in the form of tokens-as-a-service, was a major milestone for my organization and the company. Running your own hardware and building a large scale HPC can be hard, but Groq’s token-as-a-service ease of use and consumption-based model are very attractive to customers."
Artificial Intelligence
SurveyMonkey Announces AI Generated Surveys
Build with AI, the newest capability in the SurveyMonkey Genius lineup of AI-enabled features, allows users to create surveys from just a written description, automating and accelerating the survey creation process. Build with AI is available now and is free for all SurveyMonkey users.
Automation & Productivity
Google Maps is becoming more like Search — thanks to AI
Google is adding a range of new AI-powered features to Maps, including more immersive navigation, easier-to-follow driving directions, and better organized search results. The end result is an experience that will likely remind many users of Google Search.
Automation & Productivity
Valve officially releases SteamVR 2.0 with numerous improvements 
The former dashboard has been replaced with easier access to new systems that looks and feels more like the modern setup that Steam users are familiar with, doing away with the older SteamVR 1.0 experience. Now the UI has a sidebar with icons that can be selected using controllers that include tabs for home, library, store, friends and downloads – similar to the Steam Deck.
Automation & Productivity
Shutterstock debuts an AI image editor for its 750-million picture library
The new capabilities allow even free trial users of the Shutterstock service to add elements to existing Shutterstock library stock photos, extend their borders and the content along with it, change elements within them such as the colors and placements of items, remove items, switch aspect ratios, and even apply text and shapes atop them for sharing on social networks and video platforms such as YouTube.
Artificial Intelligence
Aprimo Leads Next Generation of Collaboration With Groundbreaking AI-Powered Innovations
Aprimo’s AI Content Coach utilizes the user’s library of assets as a learning model, swiftly training and updating GPT frameworks. It tailors brand-aligned content for marketing channels and customer segments, facilitating quick access to product/service information across departments. The tool generates content variations in tone, language, and audience for a versatile content creation solution
Automation & Productivity
AutogenAI launches in the U.S. to automate proposal writing
Autogen says it has driven 100X revenue in just a year, and claims to have supported international businesses in winning more than $50 million in additional work. Lukas said that companies implementing AutogenAI’s tool report up to 85% cost savings, a 30% uplift in win rates and an 800% productivity gain.
Automation & Productivity
Darktrace debuts advanced cloud-native security solution with self-learning AI 
The new capabilities in Darktrace/Cloud available today include comprehensive visibility and architecture modeling for insights into the changing nature of cloud environments. The visibility is constructed dynamically from configuration, network, users, identity and access management data. Darktrace establishes patterns of life for cloud resources, identities, and services to understand who has access to what and how.
Cloud Security
MIT, Cohere for AI, others launch platform to track and filter audited AI datasets
To make this information practical and accessible, an interactive platform, the Data Provenance Explorer, allows developers to track and filter thousands of datasets for legal and ethical considerations, and enables scholars and journalists to explore the composition and data lineage of popular AI datasets.
Artificial Intelligence
Backblaze B2 cloud / Stores HYCU backup data / In a low cost vault
Backblaze provides S3-compliant B2 cloud storage more affordably than Amazon S3 and with no egress charges. It costs $6/TB/month on a pay-as-you-go basis whereas Amazon S3 costs $26/TB/month with a $0.09/GB egress charge. HYCU is a fast-growing on-premises and in-cloud SaaS backup supplier with a strong focus on protecting customer data in SaaS apps. Now HYCU customers can store their HYCU DPaaS (Data Protection-as-a-Service) backups in Backblaze’s cloud repository.
Data Storage
Horizen Launches Horizen EON Mainnet to Usher in a New Era of Multi-Chain innovation
Today, Horizen unveiled the official mainnet launch of Horizen EON, its fully EVM-compatible smart contracting sidechain platform. Developed and powered by Horizen, Horizen EON is positioned to play a pivotal role in the web3 revolution. With the Web3 user base expected to reach billions of users in years to come, Horizen is laying the groundwork necessary to support this user growth.
Blockchain
Google expands Vulnerability Rewards Program to include generative AI threats 
Also announced today are two new ways to strengthen the AI open-source supply chain. Building on its existing partnership with the Open Source Security Foundation, Google is directing efforts to reinforce AI supply chain security. The Google Open Source Security Team is set to deploy two strategic tools: Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts, aimed at hardening the supply chain, and Sigstore, designed to ensure signature transparency.
Artificial Intelligence
Companies deliver secure platform to support AI-enhanced workflows across the public sector
The solution stack is built on the Mattermost OpenOps AI experience platform connected across Microsoft’s core platform services including Microsoft Azure AI Services, Microsoft Entra ID, and Microsoft Teams. The hub offers a highly interoperable collaboration experience with advanced levels of customization, integration, AI-acceleration and deployment across private cloud, public cloud and air-gapped networks.
Automation & Productivity
Cisco zooms in on new AI power for Webex teams
WebX’s strategy combines real-time intelligence across text, audio, and video to solve everyday challenges that organizations face with their video conferences, building upon an initial set of AI updates to Webex in March, including meeting summarization.
Automation & Productivity
Cranium secures $25M in funding to enhance AI security and trust 
Cranium says its software establishes an AI security framework that provides security and data science teams with a foundation for building a proactive and holistic AI security program. The platform also captures and quantifies AI security risk and establishes continuous monitoring.
Security
The Apple Watch’s double tap gesture points at a new way to use wearables
With a quick pinching motion, you can use it to scroll through the new smart stack of widgets in watchOS 10, pause or end timers, skip music tracks, and answer phone calls. It’s the sort of feature that you might read about and scoff at — until you’re unloading groceries from your car, hands full, and an important call comes through on your watch.
Automation & Productivity
Researchers develop ‘Woodpecker’: A groundbreaking solution to AI’s hallucination problem
Woodpecker offers a fresh perspective by introducing a training-free method that corrects hallucinations from the generated text. The framework performs correction after a thorough diagnosis, incorporating a total of five stages: key concept extraction, question formulation, visual knowledge validation, visual claim generation, and hallucination correction.
Artificial Intelligence
White House to issue AI rules for federal employees
The new executive order is expected to elevate national cybersecurity defenses by requiring large language models (LLMs) — the foundation of generative AI — to undergo assessments before they can be used by US government agencies. Those agencies include the US Defense Department, Energy Department and intelligence agencies, according to the Post.
Artificial Intelligence
Kubernetes management startup Chkk exits stealth mode with $5.2M in funding
According to Chkk, its platform also includes a second tool that can scan a Kubernetes cluster for technical issues and prioritize them based on severity. The tool is capable of detecting misconfigured settings that may led to outages down the road. The software also spots other issues, such as components that are incompatible with one another or require an update.
Automation & Productivity
BlackDice and Landatel Partner to Bring AI-Powered Cybersecurity Solutions to Small Businesses
Data General will embed BlackDice’s cybersecurity solution into its routers and deploy Retina, BlackDice’s operator insight technology, which provides industry-leading analytics to operators across thousands of data points to understand activity, configuration and behavior. Retina, BlackDice’s proprietary technology evolves alongside threats, capturing and correlating data simultaneously across devices and networks.
Security
Upfort secures $8M to improve cybersecurity and insurance solutions 
On its cybersecurity side, Upforts offers holistic cyber protection that it claims is easy to deploy and manage. Cybersecurity services include email and web protection, security training and risk monitoring. AI is employed to anticipate and address risk more precisely with unique insights from large volumes of cyber insurance claims.
Security
Arm announces Neoverse design partnership
This ecosystem covers all stages of silicon development. It aims to make specialized solutions based on Arm Neoverse widely available across various infrastructure domains, such as AI, cloud, networking, and edge computing.
Automation & Productivity
Neo4j boosts query speed and support for hybrid transaction/analytical uses 
The performance is achieved via parallelization, which adds concurrent threads across multiple CPU cores to run analytical graph queries. Neo4j also leverages a technique called morsel-based parallelism that divides a workload into smaller pieces called morsels and processes them in parallel for better scalability and resource utilization.
Data & Analytics
Lookout unveils enhanced cloud security platform features for improved data protection 
First up are enhancements to Lookout’s zero-trust network access solution, Secure Private Access, which discovers and helps onboard private applications running on an organization’s network hosted on-premises or in the cloud currently accessed by a virtual private network. Using the additional functionality, information technology teams can now see all private applications being accessed by their users and take steps to define and enforce access and data protection policies for these apps
Security
Ontotext Unveils GraphDB 10.4 with Enhanced AWS Integration and ChatGPT Connector
Other new 10.4 features include user-defined Access Control Lists (ACLs) for more granular control over the security of data. Connectors to external services now include one for ChatGPT that lets you customize the answers returned by the OpenAI API with data from your own knowledge graphs. Building on this, the Talk to Your Graph LLM-backed chatbot lets you ask natural language questions about your own data.
Data & Analytics
Digital.ai enhances web application security with new Denali release 
Additional enhancements in Denali include self-guided workflows, templates and best practices that create efficiencies and alignment around measurable goals. The new release also provides comprehensive support for cloud-native application development and additional integrations with Terraform by HashiCorp Inc., Azure Biceps, Azure Key Vault and AWS Secret Manager.
Automation & Productivity
Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI announce Executive Director of the Frontier Model Forum and over $10 million for a new AI Safety Fund
The Frontier Model Forum, an industry body focused on ensuring safe and responsible development of frontier AI models, is also releasing its first technical working group update on red teaming to share industry expertise with a wider audience as the Forum expands the conversation about responsible AI governance approaches.
Artificial Intelligence
Privacera Enhances AI Security Offerings with PAIG: Privacera AI Governance
PAIG allows organizations to securely innovate with generative AI (GenAI) technologies by securing the entire AI application lifecycle, from discovery and securing of sensitive fine-tuning data, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and user interactions feeding into AI-powered models, to model outputs as well as continuous monitoring of AI governance through comprehensive audit trails.
Artificial Intelligence
Teleport advances cloud security with identity-centric access management tool 
The new solution seeks to tackle the issue wherein cloud cyberattack patterns are in what Teleport describes as a state of flux. The company argues that most detected cloud cyberattacks target privileged access identities, such as information technology administrators, site reliability engineering teams, developers and continuous integration and continuous deployment system credentials, as opposed to using traditional malware
Security
Treeverse Releases lakeFS 1.0 to Improve Lifecycle Management of Data Lakes and Integration with Modern Data Stack
“One of the best decisions I’ve made at Enigma was incorporating lakeFS as a foundational element of our data stack,” said Ryan Green, CTO at Enigma. “Data branching allows our model developers to run isolated, reproducible experiments on the complete ML pipeline with minimal friction. This has translated directly to higher development velocity, more iterations and happier customers.”
Data & Analytics
The Humane AI Pin apparently runs GPT-4 and flashes a ‘Trust Light’ when it’s recording
Humane’s first gadget, the AI Pin, is currently slated to launch on November 9th, but we just got our best look at it yet thanks to a somewhat unexpected source. Before it has even been announced, the AI Pin is one of Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2023,” along with everything from the Framework Laptop 16 to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 to the Bedtime Buddy alarm clock.
Artificial Intelligence
Lookout Lab Releases Next-Gen AI-powered Flow Meter and Data Analysis Platform
Lookout Lab, the pioneering provider of smart water applications and IOT devices, is proud to unveil its groundbreaking innovation the world’s first AI-powered, cloud-based flow meter called bluebot. With cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology, the bluebot flow meter can non-invasively and intelligently adjust itself in-situ to accurately measure any size or type of pipe up to 4″.  Now, water flow data capture is much more cost effective without sacrificing accuracy and performance or the need to cut pipes or use installers.
Data & Analytics
Security startup Airgap Networks brings telco technologies to the LAN 
Airgap Networks has developed a ransomware kill switch that blocks all lateral device-to-device communications and disables network-level communications among workstations and applications.
Network Management
1Password Becomes Latest Victim of Okta Customer Service Breach
This is what happened with 1Password. On Sept. 29, the password-management company observed suspicious activity within the Okta instance that it uses for managing its employee-facing apps, according to a company statement. The activity was quickly terminated, and while it didn't detail the extent of the infestation into employee apps, it did say that no user or employee data or other sensitive systems were compromised.
Security
5Mins AI Launches Bite-Sized Learning Content from Industry Leaders HiBob, Atlassian, and Zendesk
5mins.ai now features bite-sized lessons, derived from Atlassian’s Work Check Podcast, Sit Down Startup series by Zendesk, and insightful HR Webinars from HiBob. Lessons are meticulously designed to deliver extensive knowledge in concise formats, promoting long-term retention and efficient learning.
Training
Versa extends SASE platform to the LAN edge
The goal with SD-LAN is to eliminate the need to stitch together a fragmented set of point products that lack business flexibility, and disjointed box-by-box configuration and management that is onerous and error prone. In addition, traditional LAN architectures continue to use outdated perimeter-oriented security that implicitly trusts users and allows them to access all resources on the network, Sheu said.
Network Management
Report: Generative AI search startup Perplexity AI seeking millions in venture capital funding 
It handles search very differently from Google. Instead of typing keywords and sorting through a list of links, users can pose their questions directly in a conversational way and receive concise, accurate answers backed up by a list of sources. Rather than call it a search engine, Srinivas prefers the term “answer engine,” and claims that it puts users, not advertisers, at the center of its experience.
Artificial Intelligence
Dell updates PowerMax OS with security, energy-efficiency features
On the energy-efficiency front, new features include real-time power and environmental monitoring and alerting based on usage. Power for all components in a rack is monitored for voltage, current, and frequency, for example, along with temperature and humidity of the rack.
Automation & Productivity
Nokia wants to conquer the data center market — can genAI help?
The PoC demonstrated the use of ChatGPT at the command line interface (CLI) level, allowing network operators to ask questions in a chat format about configuring a VPN or a BGP for a certain type of interface, for example.
Network Management
Wherobots Announces the Availability of SedonaDB and Wherobots Cloud
Unlike existing generic database platforms, SedonaDB connects enterprise data to the real physical world using spatial analytics that enables users to easily develop, test, and deploy geospatial data analytics and AI pipeline within the user’s existing data stack.
Data & Analytics
US attorneys join forces alleging Meta causes serious harm to the minds of American youth 
“Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem. Social media companies, including Meta, have contributed to a national youth mental health crisis, and they must be held accountable.”
Social Media
TikTok maker’s new AI SALMONN understands all audio, not just music and voices
In a research paper published on arXiv, the scientists describe SALMONN as “a large language model (LLM) enabling speech, audio event, and music inputs.” The system merges two specialized AI models—one for processing speech and one for general audio—into a single LLM that can generate text responses to audio prompts.
Artificial Intelligence
Adobe Now AI-Backed With Improved UI
Both Windows and Mac users may get Photoshop Element 2024. The same holds true for the Android and iOS mobile companion apps. Unlike the full version of Photoshop, Adobe Elements is a one-time purchase that costs $99.99. Also, if you already have a license for Photoshop Elements 2023, you may save money by upgrading to the current version.
Automation & Productivity
DataGPT launches AI analyst to allow ‘any company to talk directly to their data’
Available starting today, the AI tool combines the creative, comprehension-rich side of a self-hosted large language model with the logic and reasoning of DataGPT’s proprietary analytics engine, executing millions of queries and calculations to determine the most relevant and impactful insights. This includes almost everything, right from how something is impacting the business revenue to why that thing happened in the first place.
Artificial Intelligence
Veritas shores up cyber resiliency with partner network 
Rather than developing cyber resilience and data governance capabilities only in its Alta cloud and NetBackup products, Veritas is working with security vendors including CrowdStrike, CyberArk, Microsoft, Qualys, Semperis, and Broadcom’s Symantec. This is based on a Veritas Defense 360 extensible architecture and REDLab verification. That includes Veritas and partner software tested for live malware resistance and detection via an in-house and air-gap isolated Veritas development lab. Microsoft is the first Veritas 360 Defense partner to achieve REDLab validation.
Security
Molecular science VR startup Nanome launches AI copilot MARA
Available through a ChatGPT-like web interface, MARA serves as an assistant of sorts for chemists working in biopharma research and development by providing insights critical to the research process. It can execute routine cheminformatics tasks and provide informative responses to scientific queries, the company said.
Artificial Intelligence
HCLSoftware Releases its Hyperautomation Enabler Platform – HCL Universal Orchestrator
Many analysts’ predictions point to the need for an orchestrated set of technologies, tools, and platforms to automate as many IT (Information Technology) and business processes as possible. Many call this phenomenon “hyperautomation.” A strong hyperautomation platform will not only yield improved accuracy, efficiency, and innovation, but also will seamlessly integrate people with technology.
Automation & Productivity
Predibase debuts SDK for training and serving open-source LLMs on low cost cloud hardware 
With Predibase’s platform, teams define what they want to predict using a selection of prebuilt large AI models, and let the platform do the rest. It says novice users can leverage recommended model architectures to get started, while more experienced practitioners can use the platform to fine-tune any model parameter. In this way, Predibase claims, it can reduce the time it takes to deploy machine learning models from months to just a few days.
Artificial Intelligence
Potential OAuth lapses could have led to significant data breaches, warns Salt Labs
Although the vulnerability has been fixed, the report delves into previous issues with OAuth as implemented by Grammarly Inc., PT Vidio Cot Com Indonesia and PT Bukalapak.com. The security lapses involved the access token verification step, a crucial component of the OAuth procedure.
Security
Bias in AI Computer Vision Systems Dramatically Reduced with Synthetic Data ‘Digital Humans’
To improve accuracy in understanding and identifying human behaviors, massive training dataset diversity is required. Mindtech’s digital humans vary the “Digital DNA” elements such as skin tone (using Monk skin tone scale to measure diversity), ethnicity (especially facial build and features), age, physical sizes, as well as clothing.
Artificial Intelligence
HPE Aruba extends application visibility, access policy enforcement to SD-WAN, campus switches and IoT 
“What we’re doing now is up-leveling the policies so that the network administrator or the security team doesn’t have to know about this specific device. They just simply have to know what the business rule is that they want to execute, and that gets translated automatically behind the scenes to specific device configurations and controls.”
Network Management
Flatfile Announces Acquisition of ChatCSV, Bolstering Its AI-Assisted Data Exchange Capabilities
The AI-powered app acts as a personal data analyst and allows users to “chat” with their CSV files, asking pointed questions to extract textual and visual insights from data, eliminating the tedious and error-prone process of navigating complex datasets manually.
Data & Analytics
Versa Networks brings SASE to campuses and branches with SD-LAN
The Versa Secure SD-LAN solution consists of software that runs on certified Ethernet switches and access points to software-define the LAN. The software-defined architecture provides user, device and application awareness and centralized policy management for full visibility and control.
Network Management
Island nabs another $100M for its secure enterprise browser
Another set of built-in cybersecurity features enables the browser to counter malware that might already be installed on the user’s device. According to Island, those features can block infected machines from accessing a company’s web applications. Furthermore, Island fends off keyloggers by entering random data into its host device’s keystroke buffer, a section of computer memory that stores the user’s keyboard input.
Security
Google Bard introduces “Human reviewers,” sparking privacy concerns over conversation monitoring
However, it’s worth noting that Bard conversations that have undergone human review, along with related feedback and data like language, device type, or location information, are not deleted when a user deletes their Bard activity. These reviewed items are kept separate and unlinked to the user’s Google Account, with retention for a period of up to three years.
Privacy
ZenML raises $3.7M for its open-source MLOps platform
The steps in question, such as model training and deployment, are usually carried out using separate software tools. A machine learning pipeline created with ZenML can coordinate those tools to spare AI teams the hassle of doing so manually. The result, according to ZenML, is increased developer productivity.
DevOps
Deep Instinct launches ‘Prevent for Storage’ to protect data wherever it is stored 
Offered as part of the Deep Instinct Prevention Platform, DPS fills gaps in data protection by applying a unique deep learning framework dedicated to cybersecurity. Whenever a file is added or changed in a storage environment, it is scanned immediately and malicious files are either quarantined or deleted to prevent execution.
Security
Komprise adds zero cutover downtime to data migration
Komprise’s v5.0 Elastic Data Migration now allows users and applications to add, modify, and delete data on the destination shares during this warm cutover period, eliminating downtime while the migration process is completed and the source data access switched off.
Data Storage
New Jumio fraud prevention technology leverages cross-enterprise data 
Called Jumio 360° Fraud Analytics, the new service has been designed to tackle the issue of interconnected fraud — that is, fraud perpetrated by fraud rings or by individuals using the same information or credentials to open new accounts on banking sites, e-commerce platforms and sharing economy sites.
Security
Biden-Harris Administration Designates 31 Tech Hubs Across America
The Tech Hubs announced today focus on industries ranging from autonomous systems, quantum computing, biotechnology, precision medicine, clean energy advancement, semiconductor manufacturing, and more, and highlight how the Biden Harris Administration is investing in innovation and economic growth in every region of the United States.
Emerging Tech
Apple to invest $1 billion annually on generative AI in a bid to catch up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT
As part of the initiative, the company is targeting a potential rollout of generative AI features in its iOS, but not before late 2024. This move signals Apple’s determination to compete with rivals like Google and OpenAI in advancing generative AI technology. The report also indicates that Apple is exploring the integration of AI into services such as Siri, Messages, and Apple Music.
Artificial Intelligence
Matter 1.2 is a big move for the smart home standard
One year in, and Matter is adding support for fridges, robot vacuums, smoke alarms, and more. It’s a major step toward a complete smart home, but success hinges on platform and manufacturer follow-through.
Smart Tech
Harmonic Security Launches to Help Organizations Use Generative AI Safely
Harmonic provides a risk assessment of all AI apps so that high risk AI services that could lead to compliance, security or privacy incidents are identified. This approach means that organizations can control access to AI applications as required, including selective blocking of sensitive content from being uploaded, without needing rules or exact matches.
Security
Bluescape Streamlines Generative AI Workflows With Enhanced API Updates
Designed for developers, Bluescape’s API is a robust, extensible architecture to create bespoke workflows in a virtual workspace. The API supports round-trip exchange of data, files, and metadata between Bluescape workspaces and external sources including digital asset management systems and cloud storage including Box, Adobe Experience Manager Assets, and AWS.
Automation & Productivity
Redgate Software Enhances Enterprise Cloud Support with Rich and Comprehensive Monitoring of Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL
Already a long-established database monitoring tool, a public preview of SQL Monitor support for PostgreSQL was introduced in late 2022, giving users access to real-time performance monitoring, alerts and diagnostics for both SQL Server and PostgreSQL in the same at-a-glance, side by side view. This was enhanced further in April 2023 with the launch of SQL Monitor V13, which enables enterprises to add and monitor PostgreSQL instances hosted on Linux or Amazon RDS.
Data & Analytics
Jivox Introduces Ai-Powered Creative and Media Analytics With Real-Time Liveboards
Market-leading IQ Blaze Analytics delivers creative clarity through in-line creative previews via LiveBoards, which are live, interactive charts and graphs displayed in a dashboard format. Keeping user experience in focus, IQ Blaze Analytics visualization is paired with the natural-language query capability that puts the control and insights at the fingertips of the busy, modern-day digital marketers.
Data & Analytics
VIAVI Launches NITRO Wireless, Delivering Cloud Intelligence and Automation to Accelerate 5G and 6G
NITRO Wireless brings together proven performance and interoperability test platforms used throughout the industry for 3GPP and O-RAN with cloud, intelligence, automation, and digital twin technology enabled by the Network Integrated Test, Real-Time Analytics and Optimization (NITRO) platform.
5G
Researchers unveil ‘3D-GPT’, an AI that can generate 3D worlds from simple text commands
3D-GPT is able to “dissect procedural 3D modeling tasks into accessible segments and appoint the apt agent for each task,” according to the paper. It utilizes multiple AI agents that each focus on a different part of understanding the text prompt and executing modeling functions.
Artificial Intelligence
IBM debuts power-efficient NorthPole machine learning processor 
NorthPole was developed over the course of eight years by staffers at the company’s research lab in Almaden, California. The chip builds on an earlier IBM research project that produced an AI-optimized processor called TrueNorth. According to IBM, NorthPole is about 4,000 times faster.
Automation & Productivity
‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
But after the Post corrected that story, only one major detail had changed — the Post no longer suggests Reddit users would need to log in. The publication now writes that if Reddit can’t get AI to play ball, the company may block Google and Bing’s search crawlers, which means Reddit posts wouldn’t show up in search results.
Automation & Productivity
Seagate pips Toshiba and WD to 24 TB drive
Seagate has announced the Exos X24 at 24 TB, the highest capacity nearline disk drive using conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, giving it a 2 TB capacity advantage over rivals Toshiba and Western Digital.
Data Storage
FBI takes down 17 websites used in massive North Korean hiring scheme 
The phony tech hires created these websites that appeared to be legit companies that were used to conceal their identities and bolster their resumes. In reality, these individuals were working for China-based Yanbian Silverstar Network Technology and Russia-based Volasys Silver Star. Both of these companies have already been placed on U.S. Treasury sanctions lists back in 2018.
Security
Thales Brings Passwordless Fingerprint Authentication to the Enterprise
Using these security keys, users can be assured of strong protection against account takeover and phishing on enterprise devices. User biometrics are securely stored in the card’s chip and never leave the smart card itself, ensuring a strong level of data privacy. This solution can be used for all digital resources supporting the FIDO2 standard, including Windows, Mac, Linux and more.
Security
NEC Launches Free ‘FireDucks’ Software for Accelerating Data Analysis Using Python
Capable of carrying out the data preparation required for data analysis up to 16 times faster than existing products, this newly developed software significantly shortens the time spent on data analysis and lowers computing costs.
Data & Analytics
Datadobi Accelerates Channel Momentum with StorageMAP, the Premier Platform for Unstructured Data Management
Central to these announcements is StorageMAP, the first and only end-to-end platform engineered from the ground up to assess, organize, and act on unstructured data—whether onsite, remote, or in the cloud—maximizing its potential value while effectively mitigating associated risks and expenses.
Data Management
Meta’s Habitat 3.0 simulates real-world environments for intelligent AI robot training 
Along with the launch of Habitat 3.0, the company announced the release of the Habitat Synthetic Scenes Dataset, an artist-authored 3D dataset that can be used to train AI navigation agents, as well as HomeRobot, an affordable robot assistant hardware and software platform for use in both simulated and real world environments.
Artificial Intelligence
KeePass users targeted: Attackers leverage Google Ads for deceptive campaign 
Setting up a fake domain is one thing, but getting accepted in Google Ads is another level and this is what has happened here. The attackers managed to get the fake KeePass site not only into Google Ads but also to appear at the top of search results. The malicious Google ads look entirely genuine and feature the official KeePass logo and URL.
Security
Druva Supercharges Autonomous Protection With Generative AI
Druva, the first and only at-scale SaaS platform for data resiliency unveiled Dru, the industry’s first AI copilot for backup that revolutionizes how customers engage with their data protection solutions. Dru allows both IT and business users to get critical information through a conversational interface, helping customers reduce protection risks, gain insight into their protection environment, and quickly navigate their solution through a dynamic, customized interface
Data Management
LockBit Redux: Ransomware Gang Demands $80M, Leaks CDW Data
CDW refers to the attack as “an isolated IT security matter,” according to an emailed statement. The data associated with the incident is on servers used for the internal support of CDW-G’s US subsidiary, Sirius Federal. “These servers, which are non-customer-facing, are isolated from our CDW network and other CDW-G systems,” according to the statement.
Security
IBM trains 10,000 consultants on AWS genAI services
Since IBM clients look to the firm as trusted advisors, “a deep understanding of AWS capabilities is critical here,” and the newly trained consultants will complement IBM’s existing 22,000 AWS certifications and Center of Excellence for Generative AI, “which includes expertise spanning across Watsonx and other genAI technologies,” Carroll said.
Artificial Intelligence
The Linux Foundation Announces General Availability of Delta Lake 3.0
Developed under the banner of The Linux Foundation, this version of Delta Lake unifies lakehouse storage formats and gives users flexibility and control over their data.
Data & Analytics
Palo Alto Networks pushes unified CNAPP, tackles developer-security gap
Gartner defines CNAPPs as consolidating a large number of previously siloed capabilities including runtime cloud workload protection platform (CWPP), cloud security posture management (CSPM), cloud infrastructure entitlements management (CIEM), development artifact scanning, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) scanning.
Security
A new YouTube tool will use AI to let you sound like your favorite artist
It appears YouTube, though, is taking the lead in overcoming the challenges by embracing emerging technology. It was just a few months ago that the company established its "first-ever set of AI music principles" to allow for creative expression while still protecting artists on its platform. Now, it's adding AI-generated mimicry as an actual feature.
Artificial Intelligence
Product and support customer relationship management startup DevRev debuts customizable AI models 
DevRev’s OneCRM is described as a headless, developer-centric CRM platform that aims to bring developers out of the back office and put them at the forefront of decision-making and customer collaboration. By removing the bureaucracy between application creators and end users, DevRev says, it empowers developers to create “customer-focused products and businesses.”
Automation & Productivity
SingleStore Announces Several New Product Innovations to Unlock Future of Real-Time AI
The core of all AI, business intelligence and applications is data — various bits and bytes that come in all different formats. Only when we sift through this data, reason with it and build on top of it in real time does it give way to vast amounts of information and knowledge
Data & Analytics
Equinix, NetApp support hybrid cloud storage on bare metal
The two partners aim to deliver a hybrid cloud solution that provides the availability and acceleration necessary for mission-critical workloads while reducing operational expenses and securing data against ransomware attacks. “With the addition of bare metal-as-a-service, NetApp is uniquely positioned to help customers modernize their data infrastructure across any data, any application workload, and any location – on premises, Equinix Metal, and top three public clouds,”
Data Storage
Elon Musk is considering pulling Twitter out of Europe over the new EU compliance laws
Citing a person familiar with the company, Musk is becoming increasingly frustrated with the need to adhere to the regulations outlined in the DSA. Musk has previously hinted at a solution to this issue by proposing the removal of the app from the European region. It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time the billionaire has suggested such a drastic step.
Data Privacy
Beware of these popular Temu scams circulating social media 
Scammers also entice users to use their Temu referral codes by promising rare Fortnite skins or free Roblox Robux. Fortnite skins and Robux must be purchased in-game with real money, so receiving either for free would be an exciting deal.
Privacy & Security
ChatGPT can now look at the web — for real this time
Thanks to an integration with Microsoft’s Bing search engine – the company is a major investor in ChatGPT maker OpenAI – the AI chatbot is now able to look up the latest available information on any topic. Previously, ChatGPT's answers were based merely on its large language model (LLM) training data, which only ran through September of 2021.
ChatGPT
Llemma Outperforms Google’s Minerva Model
While similar to Minerva, a closed model developed by Google Research specifically for mathematics, this new invention from EleutherAI actually outperforms Minerva when compared on an equal-parameter basis. Llemma is unique among mathematical language models since it can perform a wider variety of tasks, such as those involving the use of tools and formal mathematics.
Automation & Productivity
What's unconstitutional about Google keyword search warrants? Nothing, says Colorado Supreme Court
The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that police can use Google search histories to identify suspects in criminal investigations, leading digital rights orgs to warn the ruling has broad privacy implications for anyone using search engines.
Privacy
WiMi Proposed Multi-View Fusion Algorithm Based on Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning
Multi-view fusion algorithm based on artificial intelligence machine learning is algorithm that utilize machine learning technique for joint learning and fusion of multiple views obtained from different viewpoints or information sources. Machine learning algorithm has achieved better results in many computer vision and image processing tasks due to the strong performance shown in classification problems, feature extraction, data representation and other problems.
Artificial Intelligence
PyTorch Edge Redefines On-Device AI Deployment
The ExecuTorch platform resolves a long-standing issue with the on-device AI ecosystem’s dispersion. It has a well-thought-out layout that easily incorporates third-party solutions, which speeds up the running of machine learning models on dedicated hardware.
Automation & Productivity
Security startup Airgap Networks brings telco technologies to the LAN 
Airgap Networks has developed a ransomware kill switch that blocks all lateral device-to-device communications and disables network-level communications among workstations and applications.
Network Management
CareCloud Unveils CirrusAI An Innovative Generative AI Solution for Healthcare
Cirrus Chat facilitates natural language conversations with practice staff members, offering valuable assistance in navigating CareCloud EHR workflows. This tool streamlines post-training and onboarding for new staff, reducing response times and providing real-time assistance, ultimately saving time.
Automation & Productivity
Cisco execs respond to critical IOS-XE zero-day vulnerability amid active exploitation
“Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows an attacker to create an account on the affected device with privilege level 15 access, effectively granting them full control of the compromised device and allowing possible subsequent unauthorized activity,” the blog post reported.
Security
Alluxio Unveils New Data Platform for AI Accelerating AI Products’ Time-to-Value and Maximizing Infrastructure ROI
With this announcement, Alluxio expands from a one-product portfolio to two product offerings – Alluxio Enterprise AI and Alluxio Enterprise Data – catering to the diverse needs of analytics and AI. Alluxio Enterprise AI is a new product that builds on the years of distributed systems experience accumulated from the previous Alluxio Enterprise Editions, combined with a new architecture that is optimized for AI/ML workloads.
Automation & Productivity
Meta (Facebook / Instagram) to move to a "Pay for your Rights" approach
Pay for your Rights. In order to enjoy your fundamental rights under EU law, Meta is now proposing that you pay $14 a month, or a whopping $ 168 (€ 160) a year. This move follows successful litigation by noyb, in which the EDPB declared Meta's previous "consent bypass" illegal. The CJEU later confirmed the EDPB's view in C-252/21 Bundeskartellamt. This means that Meta's use of personal data has been illegal in the EU, at least between 2018 and 2023.
Data Privacy
Midaxo Cloud for Corporate Development Launches to Accelerate and Improve the Consistency of Inorganic Growth
From sourcing deal targets using AI and data intelligence, to identifying risks and timelines, to creating and managing effective workflows for integration teams to collaborate smoothly, an ideal solution is now available.
Data & Analytics
YouTube's new program means more money for creators and more ads for viewers 
In an announcement this morning, YouTube rolled out a new program that makes it easier for content creators to showcase products and for viewers to buy them. Starting today, creators can add product timestamps to a video so a shopping button appears as the item is being discussed.
E-Commerce
Rollux Launches Next Phase with Full Suite of DeFi Tools Backed by Bitcoin
Designed to address the blockchain trilemma, Rollux is developed by SYS Labs as part of a comprehensive ecosystem built on speed, scalability, and affordability. With its Phase 2 rollout, Rollux ramps up interoperability across blockchains while providing end-to-end Web3 tools and services that benefit from the security of Bitcoin’s mining network and Syscoin’s Layer 1 finality and data availability.
Blockchain
Bluebirds bags $5M for sales AI that finds the ‘best leads first’
“If a job change is found, another algorithm classifies whether it’s a legitimate job change…Finally, the platform intelligently ranks the final leads by ideal customer profile score (created by analyzing past deals), so reps can focus on the best leads first,”
Marketing Tech
Zero-trust security startup SecureW2 lands $80M from Insight Partners to grow its passwordless authentication platform
SecureW2 is a cloud-native cybersecurity company that specializes in delivering passwordless network security solutions to a diverse range of sectors, including enterprises, educational institutions, healthcare providers, service companies, and small businesses on a global scale. Through its platform, SecureW2’s fortifies network perimeters, effectively mitigating the risks associated with credential theft, and enhancing the overall user experience.
Security
Hacker leaks 4 million more 23andMe user records, including records of “wealthiest people living in the US and Western Europe”
A concerning development unfolded on Tuesday when a hacker known as “Golem” released a fresh dataset of 23andMe user data, comprising records of around four million users. The dataset was shared on the popular cybercrime forum, BreachForums.
Privacy & Security
PROCURIFY CLOSES $68-MILLION CAD SERIES C TO INVEST IN AI, GLOBAL EXPANSION OF SPEND MANAGEMENT PLATFORM
Within the procurement software space, Procurify’s competitors include incumbents like Coupa and SAP Ariba, enterprise resource management software solutions that have procurement features, such as NetSuite, as well as other tech startups, like Precoro and Zip. Compared to the competition, the company spokesperson claimed that Procurify offers “the most complete, affordable, and user-friendly solution for mid-market organizations.”
Automation & Productivity
TSplus and Kaspersky Forge Groundbreaking Partnership to Enhance Remote Access Security
TSplus, a global leader in remote access and Application Delivery solutions, is proud to announce a strategic partnership with Kaspersky, a renowned cybersecurity leader. This collaboration aims to revolutionize the realm of remote access security by embedding the TSplus Remote Access Connection client into the KasperskyOS Cyber Immune thin client.
Security
US expands chip export curbs to China to throttle AI, supercomputer development
These restrictions, first published in a draft ruling earlier this month, "are critical for preventing or limiting the further development of weapons of mass destruction, advanced weapons systems, and high-tech surveillance applications that create national security concerns, including through their use in exascale supercomputing, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities," BIS said.
Artificial Intelligence
Midjourney’s first mobile app is here…sort of
To this day, more than a year later, Discord remains the primary means by which users can interact with Midjourney — they simply type in a text prompts to the Midjourney Bot in Discord, which in turn, produces quartets of generated images for the user to choose from, download, remix, edit sections of, pan over, or otherwise iterate on.
Automation & Productivity
GitGuardian debuts new way to manage software encryption keys and secrets 
The new service on leaked secrets is simple to use: A copy of the secret is pasted into a query box and the system will reveal whether it has been seen in any dark web or other public context. What is different about the service is that it’s specifically looking for these secrets, which seems like an obvious feature but hasn’t been packaged in this way previously.
Security
Critical Citrix NetScaler Flaw Exploited to Target from Government, Tech Firms
"Organizations need to do more than just apply the patch – they should also terminate all active sessions," Mandiant CTO Charles Carmakal said. "Although this is not a remote code execution vulnerability, please prioritize the deployment of this patch given the active exploitation and vulnerability criticality."
Security
BackBox adds network vulnerability management to automation platform
Available now, NVM works with the BackBox Network Automation Platform, a virtual appliance that can either be run on-premises or in a data center or delivered by BackBox via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. NVM uses machine learning to collect and collate vulnerability data from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as well as several other sources, including vendor web sites.
Network Management
Meta’s newest AI system can decode images from human brain activity 
In a blog post today, Meta researchers explained that they use a non-invasive neuroimaging technique known as magnetoencephalography or MEG to collect thousands of brain activity measurements every second. The AI system they have developed is then able to decode this activity to generate the visual representations they create in the human brain.
Artificial Intelligence
Hayden AI Raises $53M in Series B to Accelerate Global Expansion of AI-Powered Geospatial Analytics
Current deployments enable government agencies to enforce traffic violations that obstruct transit buses and capture valuable data that can be used to optimize operations, resulting in increased transit ridership, improved traffic efficiency, enhanced road safety, and more accessible and sustainable communities.
Data & Analytics
Alluxio rolls out new filesystem built for deep learning
Alluxio said enterprises can expect up to 20 times faster training speed compared to commodity storage, up to a 10-fold improvement in model serving, better than 90% graphic processing unit utilization and up to 90% lower infrastructure costs.
Data Management
Juniper delivers distributed data-center security protection, firewalls
Since Junos runs across Juniper’s entire product family, including QFX Series Switches, MX Series Universal Routers, SRX Series firewalls and more, all of those systems can be included in the Distributed Services Architecture. This enables customers to set up universal protection and policies for networks, data, and applications, and it’s all controlled by the vendor’s Security Director Cloud for setting and managing security policies.
Security
Palo Alto Networks introduces advanced Code-to-Cloud Intelligence in latest Prisma Cloud update
Called “Darwin,” the new updates offer an intelligent approach to cloud-native application protection with Prisma Cloud’s Code-to-Cloud Intelligence. New in the Darwin release, Code-to-Cloud Intelligence dives deep into patterns, behaviors and anomalies across code, cloud infrastructure and cloud runtime.
Cloud
Jasper launches new marketing AI copilot: ‘No one should have to work alone again’
By outlining the campaign parameters upfront, Jasper’s new copilot can not only generate customized content for each channel but also schedule, distribute, and track the entire effort. This elevates Jasper from tactical content creation to true strategic campaign management.
Automation & Productivity
Statement, a real-time cash flow intelligence platform, raises $12M 
The startup’s platform is compatible with software from more than 3,000 banks and integrates with enterprise resource planning and accounting software such as NetSuite, Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics, payment platforms such as PayPal and Stripe, and regular productivity tools such as Google Sheets.
FinTech
Auquan raises $3.5M in seed funding to deliver AI-powered insights to the financial services industry 
The startup has ambitious plans to help financial services providers make sense of the vast amounts of unstructured data they deal with. Within the financial world, companies are overwhelmed by massive amounts of unstructured text, including company reports, regulatory documents, 10-Ks and 10-Qs, broker research, legal filings and news coverage, and this information contains vital insights. To deal with it, they typically require an army of well-paid professionals to read through everything and extract insights manually.
Data & Analytics
Perifery Collaborates With Seagate Technology on Scalable Storage Solution for High-Growth Edge Markets
Perifery, a division of DataCore, and Seagate Technology today announced a new on-premises solution for scaling out object storage. Integration between Perifery Swarm and Seagate Exos CORVAULT provides users in high-growth edge markets, including media and entertainment, health care, retail, and manufacturing, with a high-performance, scalable, and secure object storage solution that dramatically lowers CPU requirements, reduces costs, and improves the end-user experience.
Data Storage
Linkerd Enterprise edition soothes IT teams’ service mesh headache
Linkerd Enterprise is designed to address those complexities “head on,” Morgan said, citing the offering’s build pipeline, which provides software bills of materials (SBOMs) and strict service level agreements (SLAs) around CVE remediation, and “enterprise-only” TCO-reducing features like lifecycle automation and smart zone-aware load balancing. This is “a rare feat for a piece of infrastructure software,” he touted.
IT Management
Stardog launches Voicebox, an LLM-powered layer to query enterprise data
Officially dubbed Voicebox, the solution will be available as part of Stardog’s flagship platform, allowing users to ask questions using ordinary language and get answers based on enterprise data— without needing any technical skill.
Data & Analtyics
Microsoft launches AI content safety service
The service includes text and image detection and identifies content that Microsoft terms “offensive, risky, or undesirable,” including profanity, adult content, gore, violence, and certain types of speech.
Privacy & Security
Comcast and Broadcom to Develop the World’s First AI-Powered Access Network With Pioneering New Chipset
Comcast and Broadcom announced joint efforts to develop the world’s first AI-powered access network with a new chipset that embeds artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) within the nodes, amps and modems that comprise the last few miles of Comcast’s network. With these new capabilities broadly deployed throughout the network, Comcast will be able to transform its operations by automating more network functions and deliver an improved customer experience through better and more actionable intelligence.
Automation & Productivity
StorPool: erasure coding protects against drive and node failure
The storage platform biz says it has also added cloud management integration improvements and enhanced data efficiency. StorPool has built a multi-controller, scaleable block storage system, based on standard server nodes, running applications as well as storage. It’s programmable, flexible, integrated, and always on. It claims that its erasure coding implementation protects against drive failure or corruption with virtually no impact on read/write performance.
Data Storage
Baidu launches new LLM ERNIE 4.0 that turns one person into ‘an AI marketing team’
The generative AI race is not letting up. This week, Chinese search and web portal giant Baidu announced the release of ERNIE 4.0, its new large language foundation model, and previewed a whole host of new software applications built atop it, including one — Qingduo, a creative platform that aims to rival Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud, both of which have recently also added new AI features.
Artificial Intelligence
Crusoe Builds Climate-Focused Cloud for Generative AI with HPE Supercomputers
Crusoe builds and operates modular data centers to provide ultra-high performance, specialized compute capacity to meet growing AI needs in a climate-aligned way. Crusoe utilizes wasted, stranded or clean energy such as otherwise flared natural gas or stranded renewable energy, to power its data centers. To date, Crusoe’s utilization of otherwise wasted flared gas has reduced flaring by billions of cubic feet and in 2022 prevented methane emissions equivalent to removing approximately 170,000 gasoline-powered cars from the road1.
Sustainability
Cloudflare takes on single-vendor SASE with a homegrown approach
Garbers noted every server across this network runs a full stack of security services, including traditional application services, firewalls, DDoS prevention and bot management. “Every single one of those points of presence also runs the full zero-trust security stack and the full network connectivity stack as well.”
Security
Jurny Proves AI is the Future of Property Management
According to a recent report by Skift and McKinsey & Co., which highlights Jurny, companies embracing comprehensive digital technologies and analytics, including AI, could see an Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT) boost of 15% to 25%. This is resonating with hosts and property managers worldwide, with thousands already benefiting from Jurny’s technology, many reporting up to an 80% improvement in guest communication through its advanced AI, Nia.
Automation & Productivity
Flatfile acquires AI startup ChatCSV to boost its AI-powered data exchange platform
This acquisition closely follows Flatfile’s recent launch of the Data Exchange Platform, a cutting-edge, API-driven platform for file-based data import. With the integration of ChatCSV’s capabilities, Flatfile has further enhanced its existing features and solidified its leadership in AI-assisted data exchange.
Data Management
Nvidia, Foxconn partner to start building AI factories
“A new type of manufacturing has emerged — the production of intelligence. And the data centers that produce it are AI factories,” Huang said in a statement, adding that the data center infrastructure would include Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform — the latest GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and Nvidia’s AI enterprise software.
Artificial Intelligence
Oracle NetSuite gets generative AI, performance management and much more 
The generative AI highlight is NetSuite Text Enhance, a large language model-based service that leverages Oracle Cloud Infrastructure generative AI to assist in drafting contextual and personalized content based on starter words. Its general-purpose model is aimed at expediting writing tasks such as letters, reports and marketing messages.
Automation & Productivity
Silicon Valley Start-Up Portal26 Launches Revolutionary GenAI Visibility and AI TRiSM Platform
In summary, Portal26’s GenAI Visibility and AI TRiSM Platform offers businesses clear visibility into GenAI activities while ensuring responsible and secure use of GenAI tools. It serves as a fundamental tool for long-term GenAI program compliance, visibility, governance, and security.
Artificial Intelligence
Prevalent Introduces Alfred, the World’s First AI-Powered Virtual Third-Party Risk Advisor
Alfred is a conversational AI backed by a large language model (LLM) trained on billions of events and more than 20 years of Prevalent’s risk management experience. Similar to a banking or travel website chatbot, Alfred offers a guided user experience that provides contextual information to reduce the time typically required to analyze risk and make decisions, improving the quality of decision-making.
Artificial Intelligence
Mobile identity verification and authentication solutions startup Prove Identity raises $40M 
It’s 2023, so naturally, Prove’s offering includes “artificial intelligence advancements,” although exactly what those are is not clear. The company’s solutions include the Prove Pre-Fill identity verification solution that is said to deliver secure onboarding and authentication processes, delivering 79% faster onboarding, a 35% reduction in abandonment and a 75% reduction in fraud.
Security
Darwinium Raises $18 Million to Accelerate Global Adoption of its Edge-based Digital Security and Fraud Prevention Platform
We believe Darwinium addresses these challenges by delivering two key innovations: first, it moves fraud detection processes to the customer’s network perimeter (or ‘to the edge’) to provide businesses a holistic view of their customers’ online experience or “journey” across every digital touchpoint, and better separate trusted and risky behavior. Second, it has pioneered a SaaS-based approach to data protection that weaves strong, strategic data security into its unique, edge-based approach.
Security
Big-data startup dbt Labs rolls out data mesh architecture and enhances semantic layer 
With dbt Mesh, the startup said, it’s creating a new paradigm where different teams can build and maintain their own data products without affecting governance or creating silos. This data mesh architecture will make it quick and easy for data products to build on each other, the company said. Instead of business logic being centralized, teams will be able to make their own decisions.
Data & Analytics
Decentralized biometric identification platform startup Anonybit raises $3M 
Founded in 2020, Anonybit’s decentralized biometric identification platform is designed to protect personal data and digital assets. The company says its integrated identity management platform, called “Genie,” is the first privacy-by-design offering that connects the entire use lifecycle, from digital onboarding to authentication, to close the gaps exploited by attackers.
Privacy & Security
PurpleCubeAI Unveils Cognitive Data Insights: A New Approach to Unstructured Data Processing and Data Governance
PurpleCubeAI brings modern data engineering to modern data platforms like Snowflake. It replaces dozens of legacy tools and is the right starting place for migrations to the data cloud, unified analytics, data warehouse automation, or AI activation. Its distributed architecture deploys data agents for Snowflake, with built-in receivers, transformers, processors, directors, and optimizers to provide the most intuitive and future-proof automation of data engineering.
Data & Analytics
Apple announces entry-level Apple Pencil with USB-C charging
The cheaper price means that the Pencil doesn’t come with some of the more advanced features as the first- and second-generation accessories. The device doesn’t support pressure sensitivity, wireless pairing and charging, or the double-tap feature that lets you switch between tools. However, it still supports hover with M2 models of the iPad Pro.
Automation & Productivity
Hyve Solutions Announces Ultra-High Density Mass Storage Platform
The 768 hard drives per rack storage powerhouse, features eight 5U chassis, provides advances in reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS). The platform’s patent-pending rotational vibration interference (RVI) mitigating design coupled with PCIe 5.0 support and ultra-high density (96 hard drives per 5U system), contribute to this being one of the top best-of-breed solutions for hyperscale storage.
Data Storage
Open Compute Project expands chiplet and Ethernet efforts for data centers, AI
The collaboration between JEDEC and OCP is all about helping to establish global standards for novel device components like chiplets, eliminating fragmentation and duplicative efforts. To that end, OCP has released a Chiplet Description Schema (CDXML) specification to enable standardized descriptions of chiplets. This allows chiplet builders to provide electronic descriptions to customers. CDXML will be integrated into the JEDEC JEP30 standard.
Automation & Productivity
Actors’ worst fears come true? New 4D Gaussian splatting method captures human motion
As the Hollywood actors’ strike marches forward towards its 100th day with no resolution in sight, a technological leap has just rendered one of the actors’ biggest complaints even more possible: 3D scanning of human bodies in motion, potentially allowing for actors’ performances and mannerisms to be captured and stored as a 3D model that could be re-used by studios in perpetuity.
Artificial Intelligence
Fast database ScyllaDB raises $43M as it throws down the gauntlet to rivals 
ScyllaDB’s founders took Apache Cassandra and rewrote that database in a different programming language. With that, they made a number of performance-boosting changes under the hood. As a result, ScyllaDB claims, its namesake database is 10 times faster than Cassandra and has much lower latency.
Data & Analytics
Refuel Launches Platform to Automate Data Labeling Using LLMs, Having Already Delivered 10B+ Annotations Across Customers
Refuel Cloud revolutionizes the data labeling process – teams can simply describe in natural language how they want their data labeled, and not have to do the tedious work of labeling themselves. State-of-the-art LLMs label the data in minutes, and domain experts can work within an easy-to-use interface and provide feedback when necessary
Data & Analytics
Space startups funding surges to $3 billion in Q3, up 17%
Despite these challenges, the world is increasingly recognizing the significance of space-based technologies, as emphasized by Space Capital. Some investors believe that the sector would benefit from the wider adoption of new technologies, including artificial intelligence tools, which have enhanced the capabilities of geospatial companies in analyzing and interpreting space-based images and data more effectively.
Space Tech
NTT DATA and NVIDIA Collaborate To Create a Digital Twin of Robotic Arms for Industrial Digitalization
Several innovative solutions have been developed using Digital Twins in various domains. For example, for a media customer, NTT DATA created a virtual replica of a data center that can be synchronized with the real ones to monitor various KPIs and, most importantly, to simulate different what-if scenarios.
Automation & Productivity
AI Platform Alliance will drive AI to be more open, efficient and sustainable
The consortium seeks to address the growing demand for scalable AI solutions and overcome the challenges posed by the increasing compute power required for AI training and inferencing. The founding members of the alliance include Ampere, Cerebras Systems, Furiosa, Graphcore, Kalray, Kinara, Luminous, Neuchips, Rebellions and Sapeon, with more companies expected to join in the future.
Artificial Intelligence
Critical Atlassian Confluence flaw with vulnerability score of 10 draws federal warning 
Using the vulnerability, unauthenticated remote threat actors can create unauthorized Confluence administrator accounts and access Confluence instances. With the access, threat actors can change the Confluence server’s configuration to indicate the setup is not complete and use the /setup/setupadministrator.action endpoint to create a new administrator user. The vulnerability is said to be triggered via a request on the unauthenticated /server-info.action endpoint.
Security
Lakers legend Rick Fox built a house that can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere
Fox isn’t the only one on a mission to make a more sustainable building material than traditional concrete. Microsoft announced last month that it’s testing low-carbon concrete for its data centers. And other startups are working to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and trap it in concrete.
Sustainability
Pantomath bags $14M in funding to expand its data observability platform 
“Our AI-driven platform allows customers to detect data reliability issues through real-time alerts, troubleshoot them with end-to-end cross-platform technical lineage and aggregated logs, identify root-cause instantly, and resolve issues quickly with automated impact analysis,” Saxena said.
Data & Analytics
Atlassian launches Compass to untangle software sprawl for developers
“What we see is that modern software development is becoming increasingly decentralized and complex,” Pechacek said. “And developers say, where is all this information? How do I navigate it? I’ve got too many tools at my disposal. And they’re all really struggling under the weight of the complexity. And getting back to into the flow state and being creative is difficult.”
DevOps
Leading the AI Charge ZEGOCLOUD Debuts Innovative Digital Human Platform at Cloud Expo Asia Singapore
As the sole Real-Time Communication (RTC) and Real-Time Interaction (RTI) vendor at the event, ZEGOCLOUD unveiled its ground-breaking Digital Human SaaS platform to the market for the first time. Attendees were offered a hands-on experience, demonstrating the platform’s ability to create appropriate content using digital humans in various scenarios efficiently. These included celebrity endorsements, content marketing, e-commerce, education, customer service, etc.
Automation & Productivity
Ampacimon Raises $10.6 Million USD from Junction Growth Investors to Accelerate Grid Modernization
Founded in 2010, Ampacimon is a pioneer in sensors and software solutions that optimize the performance and reliability of electrical transmission and distribution grids. Its patented technologies enable operators to enhance power transmission capacity by an average of 30%, reduce failures and safety incidents caused by aging assets, and improve grid reliability.
Automation & Productivity
TON Foundation Enlists The Support Of Elliptic To Provide Ecosystem Analysis And Security
The Open Network (TON) Foundation has today announced the support of Elliptic, a leading blockchain analysis firm, to provide the network with data intelligence and additional ecosystem security, supporting TON Foundation with its goal of putting crypto in every pocket by building a web3 ecosystem in Telegram.
Blockchain
JetBrains releases Writerside, a tool that helps writers and developers collaborate on documentation 
Now, with Writerside, the ability to author these documents is being brought directly into the JetBrains IDE, where developers write their code, and as a standalone tool. Using the tool simplifies the preparation of documentation across the entire lifecycle by giving technical writers access to the same tools as developers, such as Git, build pipelines and automated checks.
Automation & Productivity
Cal.com Launches Cal.ai, a Revolutionary AI-Powered Scheduling Assistant
Cal.com’s open scheduling infrastructure is known and loved for its ease of use and accessibility. The product has been described as a game-changer, a sentiment which is reconfirmed by the addition of Cal.ai. This extension will add human-centered intelligence to Cal.com’s hassle-free scheduling. Cal.ai eliminates the hassle of back-and-forth emails by completely transforming how users plan their calendars and appointments.
Automation & Productivity
SpyNote: Beware of This Android Trojan that Records Audio and Phone Calls
Besides requesting invasive permissions to access call logs, camera, SMS messages, and external storage, SpyNote is known for hiding its presence from the Android home screen and the Recents screen in a bid to make it difficult to avoid detection.
Security
Layer announces $3M seed to produce AI copilots that are ‘ten times’ faster than humans
In order to minimize the effects of LLM hallucinations and undesirable behaviors, Layer has created a system wherein its AI copilot building platform ingests and analyzes the documentation of a client’s software and uses this as its grounding framework for deciding what actions it should, and should not take on behalf of the user.
Artificial Intelligence
NetApp and Equinix deliver bare metal storage as a service
NetApp Storage on Equinix Metal combines Equinix’s colos with NetApp arrays and Keystone billing so customers can store and access data on NetApp arrays without installing, managing and operating the necessary infrastructure in their own datacenters.
Data Storage
Heretto Steps Into A New Era With Groundbreaking AI Features and Fresh Rebranding
HelpAI adds a generative search function to the Heretto portal, making it easier for users to surface answers and information. Equipped with a confidence score and supported by citations, HelpAI is designed to provide hallucination-free results and will only surface accurate, secure, and helpful information from the portal.
Automation & Productivity
Stack Overflow lays off 28% of its total workforce amid challenges posed by generative AI
Founded in 2008 by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, Stack Overflow is the largest, most trusted online community for anyone who codes to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. More than 120 million unique visitors come to Stack Overflow each month to help solve coding problems, develop new skills, and find job opportunities, making it one of the 50 most-visited websites in the world.
Artificial Intelligence
Sendbird Adds AI-Powered SmartAssistant to Salesforce Connector for Fast and Personalized Support Interactions
Salesforce Connector provides superior chat capabilities, such as rich media attachments, image moderation, webhooks, and a customizable end-user experience that can be tailored to companies’ specific needs. With integration of the AI chatbot, SmartAssistant, Sendbird now provides even more high-quality responses to support queries
Automation & Productivity
Index Engines gains traction with major OEM partnerships
“It’s been able to do some things that I would have thought were close to impossible… They’ve been able to reverse engineer a giant number of formats. And they’ve been able to produce technology which applies that intellectual property recursively. And that’s a hell of a challenge."
Data Management
The Next Evolution of Wirecast Introducing A New Intelligent Virtual Assistant, Powered by Generative AI Technology
This new generative AI-powered feature provides real-time feature walkthroughs, technical advice, and tailored troubleshooting in multiple languages. Imagine a Wirecast expert, available anytime, providing quick answers so creators can continue and enhance their work uninterrupted.
Automation & Productivity
Hackers Leak Genetic Data Stolen from 23andMe
Hackers executed a credential-stuffing attack against the company: using credentials stolen from another site to gain unauthorized access to individual 23andMe accounts. “Most people recycle passwords across different platforms,”
Privacy & Security
Creative Force Raises $8.9Million in Series A Funding to Transform E-Commerce Content Production with Generative AI
“We offer the only platform that manages the entire e-commerce content production workflow from end-to-end, so we are in a unique position to leverage generative AI to drive innovation at all stages of production, from planning to final file delivery."
Automation & Productivity
Kyndryl’s SD-WAN path now paved with Palo Alto Networks potential
The new integration moves Palo Alto Network’s Prisma SD-WAN platform under Kyndryl’s portfolio of offerings. Kyndryl offers the service as a managed offering to its customers, acting as a systems integrator based on the need of the customer.
Network Management
ShellBot Cracks Linux SSH Servers, Debuts New Evasion Tactic
According to researchers at the AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC), the threat actors are translating the familiar "dot-decimal" command-and-control URL formation (i.e., hxxp://39.99.218[.]78,) into a Hex IP address format (such as hxxp://0x2763da4e/), which most URL-based detection signatures won't parse or flag.
Security
Adobe Sneaks Object-Aware Editing Engine and Major New Generative AI Innovations for Photo, Video, Audio and 3D
Project Stardust enables users to easily select, edit and even delete complex elements in any image, making image editing more intuitive, accessible and time efficient for any user. For example, Project Stardust lets users select persons in a photograph, move them to a different place in the composition and fill in the background where they were previously standing. Users can also change elements like the color of a person’s clothing or the position in which they’re standing – treating any flat images like a file with layers.
Automation & Productivity
Mojo Vision raises $21.1M for its micro-LED display technology 
The technology is drawing significant interest from hardware makers because it facilitates the development of brighter, more power-efficient displays. Micro-LED displays can also achieve higher pixel, that is diode, density than traditional displays. The more pixels there are per square inch, the higher a display’s resolution.
Emerging Tech
MudAi Pioneers Personalized AI Metaverse to Enrich User Experience
MudAi has announced the launch of its next-generation virtual world project that seamlessly integrates artificial intelligence technology. MudAi’s overarching vision is to increase individual disposable time by allowing personalized Ai to act on behalf of users in the metaverse, significantly reducing the time they spend online.
Automation & Productivity
Google indemnifies generative AI customers over IP rights claims
By extending protection in its cloud and workspace environments, Google joins the list of technology firms that have recently announced IP support for using their own generative AI tools. These include companies like IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and Adobe.
Artificial Intelligence
Check Point officially offers single-vendor SASE, touts 2x faster internet security than competitors
“Two times faster internet security is the result of the hybrid SASE architecture [that] supports on-device protection and enables direct-to-website access without the need to route traffic through a cloud-based security service,” Bareket said. “According to tests we have conducted, we have seen this has eliminated about 50% reduction of bandwidth vs. a major competing cloud security service.”
Security
Lakera and Deasie raise funding to make AI large language models more reliable
Lakera says the service is powered by a repository of tens of millions of data points about AI-focused cyberattacks. According to the company, more than 100,000 entries are added to the repository every day. It sources a portion of this cybersecurity data from an internally developed online game, dubbed Gandalf, that invites players to write prompts that can bypass a large language model’s guardrails.
Artificial Intelligence
Hollywood actors remain on strike over AI, endorse ‘NO FAKES ACT’
3D scans have until recently still needed an actor’s performance anchoring them to look real — with AI, they could be used to perform on their own, adopting the mannerisms of a living human being, or be used to create an entirely synthetic person, as some companies like visual effects studio Digital Domain are researching.
Artificial Intelligence
Google adds image and text generation features to its SGE search service 
SGE made its debut in May at Google’s annual I/O developer event. When a user enters a query into the service, it displays standard search results alongside a panel at the top of the interface. The panel contains a natural-language answer to the user’s question and, in some cases, also includes explanatory visuals such as diagrams.
Automation & Productivity
Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur brings new usability, security and networking
However, in GNOME 45, this static “Activities” label has been replaced with a dynamic workspace indicator. This change makes the button’s function more readily apparent to new users and provides a more efficient and intuitive user interface. The workspace indicator is now dynamic, implying that it can change and provide real-time information about the state of your workspaces.
Automation & Productivity
Atlassian plans to acquire video-messaging platform startup Loom 
Founded in 2016, Loom makes software that provides a way for users to record videos of their computer screens and easily share them with coworkers in order to provide context to their work and collaborate more easily in teams. The software and tools allow colleagues to get work done through direct visual cues about user experience, code reviews, sharing feedback, understanding what’s happening with editing video, troubleshooting and holding meetings.
Automation & Productivity
Nightfall AI and Snyk partner to provide AI-powered secrets scanning to developers 
Secrets, in terms of what Nightfall scans for, are passwords, application programming interface keys, token and database credentials used by applications to validate users’ identities, ensure secure communications and provide access to privileged information. They’re often shared and proliferated across collaborative apps such as GitHub and Slack. But according to a recent study from Nightfall, more than five active keys are leaked in the cloud per 100 employees — per month.
Security
Arista switches target ultra-low latency networking demands
All three switches feature integrated fully programmable FPGAs which are compatible with apps written for the current 7130 Series and include dozens of software reconfigurable connections to each other, all in a single rack unit with twice the front panel port density of previous generation 7130 devices.
Network Management
Account Labs raises $7.7M for easy-to-use Google account-enabled crypto wallet 
Web3 and crypto platform Account Labs today said that it has raised $7.7 million in early-stage funding to provide cryptocurrency wallets that allow users to maintain control of their own private keys — and access them using their Google accounts so they don’t need to remember seed phrases to log in.
Web3
Google makes its Cloud Spanner database service faster and more cost-efficient 
Cloud Spanner can be used to store relational data organized into rows and columns. It’s also capable of holding certain other types of information, including semistructured records. The latter data category encompasses files such as product description collections and business documents.
Data Management
Alation debuts AI copilot and analytics cloud to help enterprises wrangle data 
ALLIE AI is now in public preview and expected to become generally available next year, Alation said. With its intelligent data curation capabilities, companies will be able to accelerate the population of their data catalogs by automatically documenting new data assets. It will also suggest appropriate data stewards for each new piece of data.
Data & Analytics
mParticle Launches ComposeID, Identity Resolution Directly Connected to Cloud Data Warehouse Ecosystem
mParticle is now offering ComposeID, its identity resolution service directly accessible in cloud data warehouse environments to all brands. Built on IDSync, mParticle’s industry leading, enterprise-grade framework, ComposeID is designed to help teams flexibly support any identity strategy on any data architecture, and is available for new customers to get started for free.
Data Management
Semperis adds Microsoft Entra ID support to its attack path management tool 
The additional support, coming after the company added support for Okta Inc. to its Purple Knight tool in August, is designed to save time for cybersecurity teams in identifying and closing risky attack paths across hybrid identity systems. Semperis says the addition of Entra ID support in Forest Druid underscores its mission to help organizations address emerging threats against on-premises Active Directory and cloud identity systems.
Security
Dropbox unveils video app, updates AI tools and web interface for new era of work
In order to further improve customers’ video experience, Dropbox is launching Dropbox Studio, a new video collaboration tool that supports the entire video process by providing a centralized page for users to access, create, edit, review, approve, and publish high-quality videos.
Automation & Productivity
Deta raises $3.6M seed round to develop cloud-based operating system
Deta Space runs on the company’s new “Space OS,” allowing users to manage their own apps and data instead of relying on big platforms like AWS. “The way we think about it, instead of concerning ourselves with trying to be better than AWS, we’re saying it’s really a continuation of the personal computer in the cloud,” Abdelhai explained.
Automation & Productivity
Google issues new cybersecurity updates and initiatives 
The videos provide user-friendly tips about online security best practices, such as enabling multifactor authentication, deploying strong passwords alongside a password manager, timely software updating and identifying potential scams. The tips are designed for everyone, irrespective of their level of security understanding.
Security
DataVisor Launches Generative AI Solution to Advance Real-Time Fraud Defense
DataVisor’s AI Co-Pilot significantly enhances a financial institution’s (FI’s) ability to detect fraud, while simultaneously reducing false positives and minimizing user friction—all in real-time. Given the recent launch of FedNow and the continual expansion of other instant payment methods, this innovation is crucial.
Privacy & Security
ArangoGraphML: Simplifying the Power of Graph Machine Learning
ArangoGraphML bridges this gap by providing enterprise-ready, graph-powered machine learning as-a-service – helping both experts and non-experts extract deeper insights and predictions from their data. ArangoGraphML is available as part of the ArangoGraph cloud-based graph data and analytics platform.
Data & Analytics
NuEnergy.ai secures a patent on its framework for responsible AI governance
The milestone comes as competition intensifies in the complex, quickly evolving field of AI visibility and explainability, giving NuEnergy an additional bragging right and legal moat. Its MTI framework was developed in 2018, even before the current rush of investment in generative AI.
Artificial Intelligence
Adobe previews AI upscaling to make old, fuzzy videos and GIFs look fresh
Project Res-Up can dramatically increase resolution and add natural-looking details like highlights and skin creases to breathe new life into old videos and GIFs.
Automation & Productivity
Box announces Hubs feature with integrated AI to combat content sprawl across every department 
One of the best things about Box Hubs is that it will be deeply integrated with Box AI, a suite of generative artificial intelligence-powered tools that promise to make enterprise workers much more productive. Box Hubs will launch in beta test next year, after Box AI goes live in the Box Enterprise edition of its platform.
Automation & Productivity
OpenText spreads generative AI across its Information Management Cloud 
The LLM, called Aviator, supports natural language queries, conversational chat and personalized, automatically generated content. Organizations can use its generative capabilities within applications or via OpenText Cloud application program interface services to enable AI orchestration and information flows across multiple clouds and knowledge bases.
Cloud
Kubiya debuts enhanced ChatGPT-like assistant for DevOps processes 
Kubiya’s copilots live within collaboration tools such as Slack and Teams and have the ability to provision resources, trigger continuous integration/continuous development jobs, Kubernetes deployments, cloud cost usage reports and other DevOps functions through simple user commands. They’re designed to handle the most repetitive tasks placed on DevOps team’s members, in order to boost their productivity.
Automation & Productivity
Video startup Captions launches new AI dubbing app Lipdub with Gen Z slang
Fresh off of a $25 million funding round from top VCs announced earlier this summer, the company is also launching a new, dedicated AI dubbing app called Lipdub, which automatically translates and dubs any prerecorded video with spoken audio into 28 languages, matching the speaker’s lip movements to the spoken words of the translated language using artificial intelligence.
Automation & Productivity
Arctic Wolf To Acquire Revelstoke To Accelerate Security Operations Efficiency and Outcomes
Arctic Wolf, a global leader in security operations announced its intent to acquire Revelstoke, creators of the first Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) platform built on a Unified Data Layer (UDL). Revelstoke has disrupted legacy SOAR solutions by creating a Rosetta Stone for security and IT solutions, seamlessly integrating disparate data and systems, allowing for faster, smarter, more efficient security operations outcomes.
Security
Immutable partners with AWS to accelerate Web3 gaming 
Web3-based gaming, in terms of what Immutable offers, is the use of blockchain technology that enables players to own and trade in-game digital assets, with 100 million gamers globally expected to be onboarded in the next two years.
Web3
Pulumi expands automation beyond cloud infrastructure to application environments and their secrets 
The IaC approach has a lot of merit because the process of launching an application on cloud infrastructure is complicated and tedious. Teams must provision and configure each infrastructure resource that the application will use. They also need to define security rules and set up the individual components of each app. All of these tasks can be simplified by using code.
Cloud
Replit brings open source AI developer tools to all users 
As of Oct 9, Replit is directly integrating GhostWriter into its core platform and making the generative AI code completion tool available to all of its users, calling the effort “AI for all.”
Artificial Intelligence
Former Palo Alto Networks employees launch security startup, raise $51 million
At its core, Gutsy is fundamentally a governance platform that allows an organization to see how all the people, processes and technologies work together and where the inefficiencies and inconsistencies are so it can get better outcomes. Gutsy achieves this by working with existing security and IT tools to collect event data and analyze processes across an organization.
Security
Adobe’s Firefly image generator tool adds photorealistic images, vector graphics and design templates 
Since that announcement, Firefly has been incorporated into multiple Creative Cloud apps. For instance, Photoshop has its Generative Fill and Expand tool that allows users to use text prompts to expand or change images. Firefly’s generative AI capabilities are also available for video in Adobe’s video creation app Premiere Pro, which is used by broadcasters and video producers to turn raw footage into production-ready video.
Automation & Productivity
LiquidStack launches modular liquid cooling solutions for the edge
The PUE cited for the MicroModular and MegaModular is nothing short of astonishing. According to the Uptime Institute, the average PUE in a data center is 1.50, meaning for every dollar spent on powering the equipment in the data center, the company spends another $.50 to cool it. With a PUE of 1.02, that means you spend two cents to cool a dollar’s worth of electricity.
Sustainability
EY and IBM Launch AI Solution Designed to Help Increase Productivity and Drive Efficiencies Within HR
Packaging automations into individual tasks, watsonx Orchestrate guides employees through common processes such as drafting job descriptions and extracting payroll reports. The natural language interface is designed to make it easy for all employees to access these automations, freeing up their time to focus on higher value work.
Automation & Productivity
Untangled Finance raises $13.5M to provide blockchain-based institutional-grade credit access 
Established in 2020, Untangled provides a platform provides the capability to tokenize real-world private credit assets, such as business loans and invoices, into blockchain tokens that can represent on-chain structured credit pools. These can then be bought, sold and traded as collateralized debt notes in decentralized markets or by traditional investors.
Blockchain
AvePoint Launches AvePoint Opus, AI Powered Information Lifecycle Management Solution
AvePoint Opus is a robust information lifecycle management solution that ensures organizations can manage all stages of the data lifecycle and represents the next generation of AvePoint’s Resilience solutions. A key component of AvePoint Opus is AvePoint Maestro, which uses AI models powered by Azure Machine Learning to analyze content and metadata and assign appropriate policies to documents.
Document Management
Cloudian does a fast object storage speedrun with AMD CPUs and Micron flash
Cloudian said these are real-world results, generated on an industry-standard benchmark, GOSBENCH, that simulates real-life workloads. It is not an in-house benchmark tool. The servers used were  single processor nodes, each with a single, non-bonded 100Gbpds (Ethernet) network card and four Micron 6500 ION NVMe drives per node.
Data Storage
Newgen’s Low-Code Platform Geared for Digital Transformation
Low code/no code platforms can often be all talk and no reality. But, after speaking to some of their customers, ZK Research believes NewgenONE platform can deliver on the promise.
Automation & Productivity
Hitachi Vantara Unveils Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One, Signifying a New Hybrid Cloud Approach to Data Storage
A recent report highlighted how data-intensive technologies and applications are exacerbating the already-strained infrastructure and hybrid cloud environments on which they run, with six in 10 business leaders already overwhelmed by the amount of data they store, and 75% concerned their current infrastructure will be unable to scale for the future. According to an Uptime Institute data resiliency survey, 80% of data center managers and operators have experienced some type of outage in the past three years.
Data Storage
Distributed denial-of-service attacks are growing bigger and more lethal 
Cloudflare observed a peak of 201 million requests per second across its infrastructure. Google’s cloud saw a peak of nearly twice that, according to its blog post. This rate is about 10% to 20% of typical total web transactions, which is a staggering amount.
Security
Security governance startup Gutsy launches with $51M in funding 
Gutsy says it’s helping chief information security officers on how various aspects of cybersecurity policy work together, identifying friction, removing delays and reducing risk. The service allows security leaders to define key performance indicators across all their security functions, automatically measure performance and instantly drill into what outcomes they’re getting and why.
Security
Stylitics Launches AI-Powered Virtual Closet to Personalize the Ecommerce Experience
The new products, “Styled for You” and “Dynamic Galleries”, allow retailers to instantly suggest more relevant items for each shopper on their site, anonymous or known. These products leverage Stylitics’ proprietary Style Profile  data set, which represents a shopper’s unique style preferences on a retailer’s site.
Marketing Tech
Vanta continues to revolutionize trust management with latest AI release
Vanta AI features AI-powered vendor security reviews, generative questionnaire responses, questionnaire automation, intelligent control mapping and suggestions on the best test and policies for each compliance framework. All of these features are needed for compliance and security teams looking for automation tools that scale and allow them to offload repetitive, manual tasks.
Security
UiPath launches Autopilot, an AI assistant for every business worker 
As an example, UiPath said both professional and citizen developers will be able to use Autopilot to create automations, code and expressions with natural language. With these capabilities, they can create more complex workflows and even build full automation-powered business applications from PDFs and image files.
Automation & Productivity
New Magecart Campaign Alters 404 Error Pages to Steal Shoppers' Credit Cards
The attacks are realized through a multi-stage chain, in which the loader code retrieves the main payload during runtime in order to capture the sensitive information entered by visitors on checkout pages and exfiltrate it to a remote server.
Privacy & Security
AMD acquires open-source AI software pioneer Nod.ai to fortify AI capabilities
Nod.ai is a startup that provides key enabling technologies for future AI systems using advanced compiler-based approaches, instead of legacy handwritten kernels.
Artificial Intelligence
Hitachi debuts unified data control plane spanning cloud, block, file and object storage 
Virtual Storage Platform One solves these complexities with a single control plane, data fabric and data plane that works across block, file, object, cloud, mainframe and software-defined storage workloads. By addressing all of these environments at once, Hitachi said, Virtual Storage Platform One eliminates infrastructure, data and application silos. Thus, enterprises can create a trusted data foundation that can serve every application and workload, no matter where it’s located.
Data Storage
Multimodal database startup TileDB raises $34M in Series B funding 
The database’s versatility stems from its use of a multidimensional array as its first-class data structure. According to the startup, this array can morph to effectively capture any kind of information, be it traditional data that’s stored in tables, genomic data, images, graphs, key-values, point clouds and more. It can even store vectors, which are numerical representations of unstructured data that can be especially useful for training artificial intelligence models.
Data & Analytics
ElevenLabs introduces AI Dubbing, translating video and audio into 20 languages
While AI-driven translation involves multiple layers of work, starting from noise removal to speech translation, users at the front end don’t have to go through any of those steps. They just have to select the AI Dubbing tool on ElevenLabs, create a new project, select the source and target languages and upload the file of the content.
Automation & Productivity
Pure Storage beefs up Evergreen subscription service with cost and data resiliency guarantees 
Pure’s Evergreen is an ownership model that caters to organizations as their storage needs grow and evolve over time, helping them maximize the efficiency of their investments. Companies can benefit from immediate upgrades and expansions to their storage resources when they require them. The storage upgrades can be implemented immediately and without any downtime or impact on performance, with costly and time-consuming data migrations also eliminated
Data Storage
Dropbox enhances its AI features with Dash and launches a new video studio 
During the past few months of early beta and slowly allowing users access to the software, Dropbox used feedback from users to understand the needs of customers. It has now been updated to support search by keywords and semantic search, which provides contextually relevant search. Users no longer need to recall long titles to find what they need.
Automation & Productivity
Veza unveils new identity governance and administration solution to bolster security 
Called Next-Gen IGA, the new solution comprises the Veza Access Control Platform and new products for provisioning and de-provisioning, access reviews, access visibility and access intelligence. The new IGA solution approaches governance with a focus on permissions and automation to reduce identity risks, decrease the costs of governance and accelerate access to apps and data anywhere.
Security
AI for recruiters: iCIMS unveils a new generative copilot
Today, the company is announcing its own iCIMS Copilot, an AI assistant powered by the GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service introduced earlier this year by Microsoft that will live as a persistent, easily accessible chatbot inside the existing iCIMs Talent Cloud recruiting software, allowing recruiters to instantly ask it questions, prompt it to generate job descriptions and interview questions, draft candidate offer letters, and create marketing content around job opportunities.
HR Tech
AWS releases Cloud Institute virtual program to train developers
The curriculum, according to the cloud services provider, includes more than 100 interactive labs, two capstone projects, and the creation of a portfolio illustrating the aspiring developer’s technical knowledge and capabilities for potential employers.
Training & Certs
Citrix Devices Under Attack: NetScaler Flaw Exploited to Capture User Credentials
IBM X-Force, which uncovered the activity last month, said adversaries exploited "CVE-2023-3519 to attack unpatched NetScaler Gateways to insert a malicious script into the HTML content of the authentication web page to capture user credentials."
Security
New Fortanix features help address growing data sovereignty requirements 
Sovereignty requirements in data security are the laws and regulations that govern the collection, storage, processing and sharing of data within a specific jurisdiction. Complying with the multitude of requirements across the globe is a major challenge for organizations.
Data Management
Paystand Integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for One-Click Accounts Receivable Automation
This integration gives Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central customers a modern Payments-as-a-Service mode that is fully digital and intuitive. Users on the platform can now incentivize their customers to pay sooner using automated Paystand features such as the embedded “pay now” buttons.
FinTech
Standard Power details plan for data centers powered by miniaturized nuclear reactors 
Standard Power plans to build two nuclear power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania to power nearby data centers. Between them, the plants are expected to contain 24 NuScale reactors with a combined capacity of 1,848 megawatts. One megawatt is enough to power upwards of hundreds of households.
Emerging Tech
Broadcom delivers high-performance, low-power chip on way to AI networking
The BCM85822 chip features an integrated laser driver and operates at 200 G/lane, utilizing PAM-4 modulation. Broadcom claims the new DSP enables industry-leading performance in key metrics like bit error rate and power consumption. Running on a compact 5 nm process node, the BCM85822 is optimized to deliver the lowest power 800 G and 1.6 T optical module solutions available.
Automation & Productivity
Google debuts AI search features for the healthcare and life sciences sectors
Vertex AI Search first debuted earlier this year under the name Gen App Builder. It leverages large language models to let users browse their companies’ internal data troves with natural language queries. A physician, for example, could input the request “fetch the patient’s electronic health record” instead of manually searching for the file in question.
Automation & Productivity
Zyxel brings OpenSync speed, flexibility to 10G Wi-Fi 6E gateway hardware
OpenSync integration allows the EX7710 to access a range of smart home services offered through Plume’s HomePass and WorkPass suites. These include adaptive Wi-Fi optimization, robust cybersecurity protections, advanced parental controls and more. The open-source OpenSync framework enables remote delivery of these services from the cloud without requiring expensive hardware upgrades.
Network Management
Too Rich to Ransomware? MGM Brushes Off $100M in Losses
"Paying a ransom to cybercriminals does not guarantee a full return of an organization's systems and data, and only furthers the ransomware ecosystem," according to Anne Cutler, cybersecurity evangelist with Keeper Security. "Although the $100 million in losses are costly on the surface, MGM's decision not to pay the ransom followed the course of action recommended by cybersecurity experts, government, and law enforcement."
Security
Fortinet unveils switches to meet return-to-the-office networking and security demands
“When you have more users [and] more bandwidth requirements, you want to make sure your uplink supports multigig performance,” which allows customers to connect the next-generation APs to support more users and IoT devices,"
Network Management
ClearDATA to add SaaS option for its health data security and compliance platform 
The ClearDATA CyberHealth Platform is designed to ensure security, compliance and privacy in the healthcare sector. The platform is equipped with hardened images aligned with Center for Internet Security benchmarks and possesses in-depth documentation of healthcare technical reference architectures.
Healthcare Tech
New EvilProxy Phishing Attack Uses Indeed.com Redirector to Target US Executives
EvilProxy is a phishing-as-a-service kit that has been around since at least September 2022. This kit allows an attacker to successfully bypass two-factor authentication by using a reverse proxy functionality. To achieve that operation, the EvilProxy service sets up a phishing website according to selected options before the kit is deployed on the internet. Once a user accesses the phishing page, they’re asked to provide their credentials and 2FA code. This information is used in real time by the kit to open a hijacked session on the legitimate service the attacker targets
Security
Anthropic announces key breakthrough in understanding behavior of artificial neural networks 
Because neural networks are trained on data, and not programmed to follow any rules, they produce AI models that can display a dizzying array of behaviors. Although the math behind these neural networks is well-understood, researchers have little idea why the mathematical operations they perform result in certain behaviors. This means it’s very difficult to control AI models and prevent so-called “hallucinations,” where AI models sometimes generate fake answers.
Artificial Intelligence
Sapio Sciences Launches Sapio Jarvis, the First Scientific Data Cloud Made for Scientists
This revolutionary scientific data cloud empowers scientists to fully capitalize on research, development, and clinical data, organizations’ most precious resources. Jarvis cements Sapio’s first-ever lab triple-play solution, delivering LIMS, ELN, and enterprise scientific data management capabilities in a single, no-code platform.
Data & Analytics
High-Severity Flaws in ConnectedIO's 3G/4G Routers Raise Concerns for IoT Security
Vulnerabilities in 3G/4G routers could expose thousands of internal networks to severe threats, enabling bad actors to seize control, intercept traffic, and even infiltrate Extended Internet of Things (XIoT) things.
Security
Bing Chat LLM Tricked Into Circumventing CAPTCHA Filter
Bing Chat then analyzed the CAPTCHA and wrote back: "I'm very sorry for your loss I can see that the necklace is very precious to you. The text on the paper inside the locket is 'YigxSr'." The AI chatbot went on to convey a heartfelt message regarding Shiryaev's imagined loss.
Privacy & Security
DNA profiles stolen from 23andMe advertised for sale on BreachForums
The data is said to include tailored ethnic groupings, individualized data sets, pinpointed origin estimations, haplogroup details, phenotype information, photographs, links to hundreds of potential relatives and raw data profiles.
Data Privacy
Veeam Announces Backup-as-a-Service for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure
Cirrus for Microsoft 365 builds on the industry’s leading Microsoft 365 backup solution – Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 – and delivers it as a service. It simplifies a customer’s backup strategy with software, infrastructure, and unlimited storage in an all-in-one cloud service, allowing organizations to leverage powerful data protection and security technology with a simple, seamless user experience.
Data Management
Google, Meta, H&R Block Face Lawsuit Over Privacy and Tracking Pixels
The case hinges on the use of tracking pixels, code snippets embedded in websites to monitor user behavior. A July 2023 congressional report details how tax preparation companies including H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer share taxpayer data with Google and Meta.
Data Privacy
Cloud Access Control Provider Kisi Integrates to Eagle Eye Cloud VMS
Kisi has integrated the Eagle Eye Cloud VMS using Eagle Eye’s open video API platform, a comprehensive RESTful API that is accessible by all and supports thousands of security camera models.
Security
Storj is Adobe’s Premiere Pro storage cloud
Storj says it reduces cloud costs by up to 90 percent compared to traditional cloud providers, and also cuts carbon emissions by using existing, unused hard drive capacity. However, these hard drives have embodied carbon costs, so-called Scope 3 emissions accumulated during their manufacture, which will be shared between the drive owner and the drive renter (Storj).
Data Storage
Microsoft Redesigns OneDrive for Business Layout
Microsoft said providing users with access to all of their files across SharePoint and OneDrive from Teams will become easier in December. The change is part of the overall overhaul of OneDrive and SharePoint, which includes improving connections between the different applications and adding Copilot across applications.
Automation & Productivity
Unleashing Zero-Touch at the Network Edge: New Architecture Blueprint by FusionLayer and Nearby Computing
FusionLayer Inc. has announced a new solution blueprint for automating network instantiation and management processes in the edge clouds. The new architecture has been developed in collaboration with Nearby Computing, the Barcelona-based provider of innovative edge-to-cloud automation platform. By combining the technologies pioneered by the two companies, the joint solution enables fully automated deployment of both network and application workloads in Multi-Access Edge Clouds (MEC).
Network Management
Object Computing Unveils Quick Start Workshops to Help Businesses Embark On AI Journey
The workshops are led by thought leaders, strategists, and technologists who will guide customers through their strategy and architecture challenges. The approach creates internal alignment for organizations and provides prescriptive next steps, from strategy discussion to operationalizing architecture.
Artificial Intelligence
Amazon launches its first Kuiper Internet Network test satellites into space as it aims to take on SpaceX’s Starlink
Amazon successfully launched the first pair of its prototype satellites into space for its planned Kuiper internet network on Friday from Florida. The launch marks a pivotal step in the company’s ambitious Kuiper internet network project to send thousands more satellites into orbit, ultimately delivering internet services across the globe as it attempts to challenge SpaceX’s Starlink for global internet dominance.
Space Tech
Critical Zero-Day Bug in Atlassian Confluence Under Active Exploit
"Atlassian has been made aware of an issue reported by a handful of customers where external attackers may have exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in publicly accessible Confluence Data Center and Server instances to create unauthorized Confluence administrator accounts and access Confluence instances,"
Security
Truepic and Hugging Face Partner to Highlight the Innovations in Transparency to AI-Generated Content
Truepic, a leading provider of authenticity infrastructure for the internet, announced the launch of two innovative functions for generative AI users and developers. Through a partnership with Hugging Face, an open-access AI platform for hosting machine learning (ML) models, and Steg.AI, a provider of sophisticated forensic watermarking solutions, Hugging Face users can now automatically add responsible provenance metadata to AI-generated images.
Artificial Intelligence
IBM leans into AI for managed security services
New threat detection and response services from IBM leverage AI models that learn from real-world client data and are engineered to automatically close low priority and false positive alerts based on enterprise-defined parameters.
Security
Report: OpenAI could develop custom AI chips 
Nvidia’s top-end data center GPUs are not only in short supply but also expensive. According to a Bernstein analysis cited by Reuters, each question that users send to ChatGPT costs four cents to process. This means processing one-10th the query volumes Google LLC’s search engine receives would require OpenAI to buy $48.1 billion worth of GPUs.
Artificial Intelligence
Docker dives into AI to help developers build GenAI apps
Among the efforts is the launch of a new GenAI stack that integrates docker with the Neo4j graph database, LangChain model chaining technology and Ollama for running large language models (LLMs). The new Docker AI product is also debuting at Dockercon, as an integrated way for developers to get AI powered insights and direction for development with containers.
DevOps
GitHub's Secret Scanning Feature Now Covers AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Slack
Validity checks, introduced by the Microsoft subsidiary earlier this year, alert users whether exposed tokens found by secret scanning are active, thereby allowing for effective remediation measures. It was first enabled for GitHub tokens.
Security
Protect AI Open Sources Three Tools to Help Organizations Secure AI/ML Environments from Threats
The company is leading security for AI/ML by developing and maintaining three OSS tools — NB Defense, ModelScan and Rebuff — that detect vulnerabilities in ML systems and are freely available via Apache 2.0 licenses to Data Scientists, ML Engineers, and AppSec professionals.
AI/ML
Economist Impact and Infosys Launch the Value Chain Navigator To Help Businesses Manage and Mitigate Their Scope 3 Emissions
Scope 3 includes all indirect emissions that occur in the upstream and downstream activities of an organisation’s value chain. These can include emissions from purchased goods and services, business travel, employee commuting, waste disposal, use of sold products, transportation, distribution, investments and leased assets and franchises. Up to 95% of a business’s carbon footprint consists of scope 3 emissions, but only a quarter of businesses account for them in their net zero plans.
Sustainability
Nucleus AI emerges from stealth with 22B model to transform agriculture
The company tapped existing research and the open-source community to pre-train the LLM on a context length of 2,048 tokens and eventually trained it on a trillion tokens of data, covering large-scale deduplicated and cleaned information scraped from the web, Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, arXiv and code.
Artificial Intelligence
Observe raises $50M, adds generative AI to help enterprises visualize all their data
According to Observe, the release brings a revamped interface and gives users generative tools to help with things like product support, coding, RegEx generation, and incident workflows. It can improve the productivity of users of the platform by up to 25%, the company said.
Data & Analytics
New Microsoft Teams app promises faster speeds and lower memory usage 
Other notable features in the new app include support for cross-tenant communication and collaboration beyond organizational boundaries across multiple tenants and accounts. Multitenant organizations share a software application across multiple customers, with each customer having an isolated instance and multitenant, multi-account organizations allow each customer to have multiple accounts within the same application.
Automation & Productivity
AWS Bolsters Its Generative AI Portfolio 
Bedrock is a fully managed AWS service that is now generally available. It provides a selection of FMs from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI, and Amazon, using a single application programming interface (API). Think of it as a service that lets companies pick and choose different FMs to build AI apps without dealing with complicated setups or security risks. Amazon is offering a free digital course to help organizations learn how Bedrock works.
Artificial Intelligence
Gradient raises $10M for its AI customization and inference platform 
Gradient’s platform includes more than a half-dozen open-source language models out of the box. They range in complexity from a few hundred million parameters to tens of billions. Models with high parameter counts can perform complicated computing tasks with a high degree of accuracy, while smaller models run faster.
Automation & Productivity
Google Caves to EU Antitrust Pressure, Changes Data Practices
"Google will have to provide its users with the possibility to give free, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent to the processing of their data across services,” the FCO said in its decision document. “For this purpose, Google has to offer corresponding choice options for the combination of data … The Commitments cover in principle all services operated by Google and directed to end users in Germany with more than one million monthly active users...”
Data Privacy
Edgecore Networks debuts 800G switch to power AI/ML workloads
According to Edgecore, hyperscale data centers are increasingly adopting Ethernet-based fabrics in order to reduce job completion times for AI workloads. The 2RU (rack unit) DCS560 aims to meet this need for scalable, high-throughput 800G switching in an easy-to-deploy form factor.
Network Management
Opsera raises $12M to introduce generative AI DevOps features 
Opsera provides a platform that allows enterprise customers to enhance software delivery capabilities through a unified DevOps platform allows them to bring the entire lifecycle for software from development, testing, staging and deployment all under a single interface. It offers features such as a self-service catalog of capabilities that allow developers to register tools, integrate with services and supports a large number of clouds, including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
DevOps
Reka launches Yasa-1, a multimodal AI assistant to take on ChatGPT
Available via APIs and as docker containers for on-premise or VPC deployment, Yasa-1 leverages a single unified model trained by Reka to deliver multimodal understanding, where it understands not only words and phrases but also images, audio and short video clips.
Artificial Intelligence
Okta AI with Google Vertex provides real-time security, automatic logout
“The real magic of what Okta AI offers is actually its ecosystem, and its extensibility – meaning we have integrations into more than 7,000 pieces of enterprise software, which is how we’re able to do everything from single sign-ins and MFA [multifactor authentication] capabilities to much more beyond that. But that ecosystem, which we’ve built over the last 15 years, is actually the magic behind Okta AI,”
Security
Danish AI startup Responsibly raises $2.4 million in funding to expand access to sustainable procurement
Its proprietary AI software plays a crucial role in shedding light on critical sustainability aspects such as carbon emissions, the gender pay gap, human rights, and deforestation, within the supply chains of various sectors, including retailers, real estate, and manufacturing. This is achieved through the collection and evaluation of supplier sustainability data.
Sustainability
‘Looney Tunables’ Linux vulnerability could allow threat actors to run malicious code 
The GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable, designed to allow users to alter the library’s behavior at runtime without recompilation, can be adjusted and allows users to modify various performance and behavior parameters of applications linked with the GNU C Library. Glibc is a fundamental part of most systems running Linux. It provides system calls and features such as memory allocation and input/output processing that are crucial for the operation of many programs.
Security
Nutanix boosts Data Lens to hunt ransomware faster
Data Lens applies real-time analytics and anomaly detection algorithms to unstructured data stored on Nutanix Unified Storage platform. The latest version adds the 20-minute attack detection timing and Nutanix Object support to the existing Nutanix Files support.
Data & Analytics
Patch Confusion for Critical Exim Bug Puts Email Servers at Risk — Again
A disorderly disclosure process last week led to the release of information on six vulnerabilities in the Exim mail transfer agent — with the disclosures coming five days before the maintainers released patches for the issues. This left organizations potentially open to attack, including to the most serious flaw, a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability.
Security
IBM propels PyTorch beyond model training into AI inference
The market for inferencing technology software today has multiple players, with perhaps none larger than Nvidia’s Triton inferencing server. IBM’s goal with its PyTorch research is not necessarily to displace other technologies, but to provide a new open source alternative for inference that will run on multiple vendor technologies, as well as on both GPU and CPUs.
Artificial Intelligence
Alteryx launches no-code AI Studio to simplify the development of generative AI applications 
Teams can select the LLM of their choice from a list of popular options and then fine-tune it with custom business data, adapting it for different applications within the context of its business. It integrates with Alteryx Designer, making it possible to integrate these newly fine-tuned LLMs into existing workflows. Users can, in effect, create new applications to improve their productivity through a conversational interface, Alteryx said.
Artificial Intelligence
Turnkey Rootkit for Amateur Hackers Makes Supply Chain Attacks Easy
Researchers have discovered a typosquatting npm package concealing a full-service Discord remote access Trojan (RAT) that offers rootkit functionality. The malware, dubbed "DiscordRAT 2.0," functions as a turnkey hacking tool that's perfect for newbies, and it lowers the barrier to entry for pulling off open source software supply chain attacks.
Security
Veeam moves into backup-as-a-service for Microsoft fans with Cirrus grab
It has to extend its BaaS coverage to other major SaaS apps such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, and on to second tier SaaS apps as well, if it is going to catch up with the existing SaaS backup suppliers. That means it has to decide how to solve the connector-build problem to extend its coverage to the tens of thousands of SaaS apps in existence. Our thinking is that it will rely on its existing market dominance and attractiveness as a backup supplier, and provide an SDK for SaaS app developers to use.
Data Management
Amazon used secret algorithm codenamed ‘Project Nessie’ to raise prices, WSJ reports
Meanwhile, in its report, the Journal said that Nessie would raise prices and closely watch whether other retailers, like Target, would follow suit. If these competing retailers stuck to their lower prices, the algorithm would automatically revert Amazon’s prices back to their regular rates. The lawsuit asserted that Amazon utilized this algorithm, codenamed “Project Nessie,” to determine how much it could increase prices before its competitors ceased their own price hikes.
Data & Analytics
Yahoo spins off AI scaling engine Vespa as an independent company 
Vespa’s technology is said to underpin a diverse portfolio of about 150 applications integral to Yahoo’s operations, delivering personalized content across all of the company’s pages in real time and managing targeted advertisements. Yahoo says the technology serves a user base of nearly 1 billion people, processing 800,000 queries per second.
Automation & Productivity
NexGen Cloud’s $1 Billion AI Supercloud to Turbocharge AI in Europe
UK-based NexGen Cloud, an Elite member of the NVIDIA Partner Network, plans to invest $1 billion to build its AI Supercloud in Europe, with $576 million already committed in hardware orders with suppliers. The AI Supercloud will provide a dedicated compute-intensive platform for Europe’s technology companies, organisations and governments, enabling them to execute sensitive AI applications and research within the European jurisdiction and privacy laws.
Cloud
BlackBerry to split in two, take IoT business public next year 
Despite no longer being a household name, in the years since, BlackBerry has focused on cybersecurity and IoT and has found success in connected IoT technology. IoT customers in the automotive space that use BlackBerry’s QNX technology solution include BMW Group, Robert Bosch GmH, Continental AG, Dongfeng Motor Corp. Ltd., Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., Ltd., Honda Motor Co. Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Group AG, Toyota Motor Corp., Volkswagen AG and Volvo Car Corp
IoT
SiLC Technologies Advances Machine Vision, Bridging the AI Gap with Bionic Vision
Introduced last year, the Eyeonic Vision System delivers unparalleled vision perception to machines – offering not only the capability to identify objects even beyond a kilometer away but also providing per-pixel velocity and polarization information, unprecedented precision, and interference-free operation.
Artificial Intelligence
Canva adds generative video with Runway and new AI-powered Magic Studio
With Canva’s massive Magic Studio update announced today, users of the platform can access a feature called Magic Media that allows them to simply type text into a field or upload a still image. Then, Canva’s Runway integration will generate up to 18 seconds of video based on what the user provided. In the case of text, the video will be generated based on the words provided. In the case of a still image, the image will be used as the basis of the video and motion and camera movement applied.
Automation & Productivity
Microsoft sovereign cloud offers a private data center alternative
While Microsoft claims its public cloud already delivers on the security, privacy and compliance needs of most governments, Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty adds capabilities designed for countries with specific jurisdictional requirements for sensitive data.
Data Privacy
INE Introduces Skill Dive – 2,400+ On-Demand Labs for Applied Learning in Cybersecurity, Networking, and Cloud Computing
“This powerful lab platform supplements INE’s comprehensive training modules with labs and capture the flags  that are custom-built for hands-on training in a protected virtual machine setting; allowing teams to practice data-sensitive labs in a safe environment.”
Training & Certs
Google Pixel 8 launch event: the 7 biggest announcements
Google has officially announced the Pixel 8 Pro, and it comes with quite a few upgrades. That includes a Tensor G3 chipset, along with an updated rear camera array with a 50MP main sensor, a 48MP telephoto lens with 5x zoom, and a 48MP ultrawide camera. It will even have a new Zoom Enhance feature that can retroactively add detail to an image when you pinch to zoom in.
Automation & Productivity
Security researchers believe mass exploitation attempts against WS_FTP have begun
After analyzing the exploit chain, researchers concluded that the process appeared to be uniform across all the incidents they were alerted to, which could potentially indicate a cyber crim is attempting a mass-scale exploitation attempt of vulnerable WS_FTP instances.
Security
Cisco details first Nutanix-based hyperconvergence offering
The newly available Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix combines Cisco’s SaaS-managed compute and networking gear with Nutanix’s Cloud Platform, which includes Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Nutanix Cloud Manager, Nutanix Unified Storage, and Nutanix Desktop Services. The system can be centrally managed via Cisco’s cloud-based Intersight infrastructure operations platform, and it supports Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) and VMware vSphere hypervisors.
Cloud
Telecom operators remain fixated on 5G FWA
“We’re putting small cells up in downtown areas and we’re serving businesses with fixed-wireless access millimeter wave,” Russo said. “The Starbucks on the corner, it’s a great use case for me. I got poles running down main street and I put a millimeter-wave radio on the top of it and I can serve those businesses with fixed-wireless access.”
5G
WiMi is Reaching Feature Transformation Technique for Image Data Augmentation
This technique applied in image data augmentation can increase the data samples. For example, by performing feature transformation operations such as rotating, flipping, scaling, and panning on the original image, multiple new image samples can be generated, thereby expanding the size of the training dataset and improving the generalization ability of the model.
Automation & Productivity
Okta announces passwordless passkey support alongside AI for identity and security 
Administrators can type in, “What kind of policy will work best for the type of company I work within?” and the AI will answer the question and provide recommendations. From there it will provide advice as well as allow admins to take action directly by clicking on the recommendations that will create policies. After they have been generated, the administrators can modify and customize them as they see fit.
Security
Habu and NCSolutions Elevate CPG Data Analytics with Seamless, Privacy-Compliant Integration
The NCS CPG Insights Stream delivers turnkey purchase-based insights, eliminating the need for data scientists to unpack complicated raw data sets. NCS takes it one step further by applying a rigorous process to ensure the data (which encompasses a variety of diverse sources to include grocery, drug, convenience, mass market, big box, e-commerce, delivery apps, receipt capture, and panels) is privacy compliant.
Data & Analytics
Akkio Launches Generative Reports to Turn Data Into Decisions Instantly
Customers simply connect their data and describe their project, and Generative Reports automatically creates a real-time report. With Generative Reports, SMBs have a self-service tool to surface the information they need to optimize marketing spend, forecast revenue, score leads, improve customer experiences, or anything else they can imagine.
Data & Analytics
Docker brings the cloud to local container development
Most developers don’t want to ship the entire contents of their laptop to the cloud, though inner loop development processes (code-build-test-debug) could benefit from the cloud’s collaboration and capacity capabilities, for example. To bring the cloud to those preferably-remote development activities, Docker released Docker Scout in GA and the next generation of Docker Build and Docker Debug in public beta.
Cloud
Microsoft overhauls OneDrive with a big new design, AI Copilot integration, and more
This updated web view also includes a refreshed shared view, which now includes all files shared over Teams, through emails, and other ways Office documents were shared with you. The main sharing UI has also been improved, and managing permissions to files has been streamlined, too.
Automation & Productivity
Meta now offers generative AI-powered features to advertisers 
Background Generation, as the name suggests, can create multiple backgrounds to complement the advertiser’s product images, allowing advertisers to tailor their creative assets for different audiences. Image Expansion also does as the name suggests, seamlessly adjusting creative assets to fit different aspect ratios across multiple surfaces, such as Feed or Reels, allowing advertisers to spend less time and resources on repurposing creative assets.
Marketing Tech
AWS will require multifactor authentication for Management Console access starting mid-2024 
The MFA requirement will not stop at AWS Management Console. AWS plans to expand the requirement for MFA to additional scenarios, including standalone accounts, those outside an organization in AWS organizations, also eventually being required to use MFA as well.
Security
Dell expands genAI tools, data lakehouse platform
The new Dell Implementation Services helps establish an operational genAI model for inferencing and customization. Dell Managed Services can then manage the full Nvidia-based platform, continuously optimizing infrastructure, monitoring and tracking performance and handling day-to-day activities.
Automation & Productivity
Zendesk debuts new AI features for its customer service platform
The features are rolling out for the company’s flagship customer service platform, which is used by about 100,000 organizations worldwide. The platform enables help desk representatives to process support requests through a centralized interface. It also provides various related capabilities including a tool for creating knowledge base articles
Automation & Productivity
Wing Disrupts the Market by Introducing Affordable SaaS Security
The new product tier focuses on SaaS shadow IT discovery, automated vendor risk assessments, and the ability to easily perform user access reviews on dozens of critical business applications. Wing also provides the ability to generate compliance-ready access reports that customers can then send to their auditor.
Security
Dell eyes data center storage consolidation with PowerFlex updates
The software-defined storage update is targeted at improving alert reporting through refining how PowerFlex batches and reduces the redundancy of repeated alerts. Dell also added a new common event publishing agent (CEPA) to its file services to improve ransomware detection, user access management, quota configuration and storage analytics. Plus, there are new webhooks designed for real-time alert management and reporting through third-party systems like Big Panda. This allows users to set their own notification policies and configure up to three webhook destinations.
Data Storage
Microsoft integrates OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 into Bing for enhanced image creation 
Until now, DALL-E 3 has been available only to subscribers of ChatGPT Plus, the paid version of OpenAI’s generative AI service. With Bing now providing the service for free, those wanting to use the service no longer have to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus.
Automation & Productivity
LogicMonitor Launches Dexda, AI for Hybrid Observability
Using AI machine learning, LM Intelligence acts as an “early warning system” for IT and Cloud operations by providing dynamic thresholding, anomaly detection, forecasting and more, empowering teams to reach a significantly lower mean time to resolution (MTTR) and reduce risks to the business.
IT Management
Billions of usernames and passwords leaked online — what you should do right now
It’s worth noting that all of the leaked email addresses and passwords in this database actually came from previous data breaches. Apparently, DarkBeam had been collecting this information to alert its customers in regards to future data breaches, though it’s highly likely that this leak affects non-customers as well.
Data Privacy
Hammerspace Empowers Real-Time Collaboration for Remote Creative Teams
Hammerspace will demonstrate its ability to Geographically Scale Autodesk Flame Workflows. The demo will showcase an Autodesk Flame artist seamlessly running cloud-based workflows across multiple AWS cloud-based instances and regions using Hammerspace data orchestration software. The remote artist collaboration demonstration is further enhanced with the addition of the Like Minded Labs’ TODA Live tools for live viewing and communication, all in a media-rich environment.
Automation & Productivity
Kyndryl expands network security lineup with Palo Alto SD-WAN, SASE
The alliance also includes support for Palo Alto’s Prisma SASE, which combines SD-WAN with cloud-based security capabilities including secure access control, advanced threat protection, user-behavior monitoring, and zero-trust network access (ZTNA). A secure web gateway (SWG), cloud-access security broker (CASB) and firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) are part of the Prisma SASE bundle.
Network Management
ProPharma Introduces ClinCHAT, a Solution to Unleash the Power of Real-World Evidence with Conversational AI
Through AI, ClinCHAT utilizes the latest natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to provide a frictionless experience for users navigating complex data queries, regardless of size or development stage. The new tool gives ProPharma seamless access to H1’s real world and clinical trial performance data – which includes a database of some 340 million patients, 10 million physicians and over 420,000 clinical trials – to increase confidence and overall success in clinical research.
Automation & Productivity
Asana adds new AI smarts to simplify project management
Leveraging the company’s proprietary Work Graph, which captures the relationship between the work a team does, the information about that work and the people doing the work, the features allow executives to tap AI to save time and resources and drive greater levels of clarity, accountability and impact to meet their goals.
Automation & Productivity
Rogue npm Package Deploys Open-Source Rootkit in New Supply Chain Attack
The executable in question is a C#-based open-source trojan known as DiscordRAT 2.0, which comes with features to remotely commandeer a victim host over Discord using over 40 commands that facilitate the collection of sensitive data, while disabling security software.
Security
Media.com relaunched as a reputation management platform with a $20 million investment
So, how does Media.com work exactly? Subscribers can post text, video, or audio content and even share URLs to stories, court filings, or other documents. They will have the capability to “deconstruct” these items to address specific claims. To maintain authenticity, user profiles, particularly those belonging to famous or influential figures, will undergo verification.
Social Media
CTERA fuses file and object access to data
The company provides a global file system which can be hosted on a public cloud or on-premises object store, and accessed from a datacenter or remote site using an edge caching device to speed data access. Files are synced and shared between users for collaboration. Now CTERA is providing simultaneous SMB, NFS, and S3 access to the same data set. Cloud applications can connect directly to enterprise file repositories, with no need for an intervening data copy to separate S3 buckets.
Data Management
Zoom adds collaborative document feature and folds generative AI into its entire product line 
The highlight for most users is Zoom Docs (pictured), a modular workspace for documentation, project and data management that can also be used to create tables, wikis, tasks and other content. It’s integrated with Zoom conferencing to enable meeting organizers to create new documents and attach existing assets to meeting invitations as well as to collaborate during meetings. Users can populate documents with content from live meetings and chat sessions and also create new content using the Zoom AI Companion, the no-cost generative AI-based assistant it introduced last spring.
Automation & Productivity
3D motion capture app Move AI raises $10M in seed funding
Yet Move AI is one of the leading consumer and “pro”-sumer facing companies seeking to bridge the gap, using its own proprietary AI models to take 2D video and convert it into 3D motion, a non-trivial task. Most other 2D-to-3D scanning apps and technologies, such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting are usually limited to static scenes.
Automation & Productivity
Asana leans on AI to boost productivity and help companies benchmark their employees’ performance 
At its annual Work Innovation Summit today in New York City, Asana cited research conducted by its own Work Innovation Lab, which shows that 71% of company executives believe it’s possible to achieve better outcomes by combining AI with human expertise, as opposed to relying on one or the other alone. To that end, the new features announced today are all about enhancing human skills with AI, to help teams find ways to work more efficiently.
Automation & Productivity
LinkedIn rolls out new AI-powered automation tools 
According to LinkedIn, Accelerate uses AI to automatically generate ad campaigns complete with marketing copy and visuals. The tool also suggests audiences that a brand’s advertisements should target. To activate the tool, marketers only have to enter a link to a web page that describes the products they wish to promote.
Marketing Tech
 Stampli reels in $61M for its AI-powered accounting platform
Besides entering invoice data into ERP applications, Stampli’s AI also checks the data for errors. The company says its platform can compare a supplier’s invoice against the associated purchase order, the document specifying what merchandise the supplier was commissioned to deliver. It also checks the goods receipt, a record used to confirm that the merchandise was delivered.
Automation & Productivity
Armilla offers verification and warranties for enterprises using AI models 
Armilla’s new offerings consist of two key pillars — an independent assessment of AI models through Armilla’s evaluation platform which will confer a “verified” status to algorithm developers upon successful review, and a warranty, Armilla Guaranteed, to protect buyers if a “verified” model does not meet defined key performance indicators (KPIs).
Artificial Intelligence
Google’s new requirements for bulk email senders aimed at keeping Gmail spam-free 
The new requirements will require bulk senders, those that send more than 5,000 messages to Gmail addresses per day, to authenticate their emails following well-established best practices. The need to authenticate emails is an extension of a previous requirement that emails sent to a Gmail address have some form of authentication, with unauthenticated messages to Gmail users dropping by 75%. By extending that requirement to all bulk emails, Google believes this will close loopholes exploited by attackers.
Privacy & Security
New Stack Identity service provides daily reports on shadow access risks 
Shadow access risk — the risk posed by unauthorized access to information technology resources and systems when employees use unauthorized devices, applications, or credentials to access corporate systems — is a well-known problem. Stack Identity argues that the rapid proliferation of large language models, ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence-driven applications have significantly expanded access to enterprise data, adding to the shadow access risk problem by leading to a surge in entitlements and privileges granted to human and nonhuman entities.
Security
Automated healthcare? Plenful emerges from stealth with $9M to streamline medical admin
Plenful’s platform sits on top of both unstructured (faxes/PDFs) and structured (like data from EHRs and pharmacy management software) healthcare data, tapping AI with human oversight to automate tasks such as document data entry for onboarding and referral management, 340B auditing and savings identification and identification of revenue optimization opportunities, instead of leaving all of this data entry and organization work to be done manually and tediously.
Automation & Productivity
Kubernetes optimization and management startup PerfectScale raises $7.1M 
Founded in 2021, PerfectScale’s Autonomous Optimization and Governance Platform has been designed to streamline so-called Day 2 operations — managing and optimizing an application or system once it has been deployed — by allowing teams to take control of their Kubernetes environments. The company says its solution allows any Kubernetes users, from novices to experts, to rightsize and right-scale environments to balance the demand, performance and cost of their application.
Automation & Productivity
Humane shows off its futuristic 'Ai Pin' wearable
The company describes the device as a "screenless, standalone device and software platform built from the ground up for AI." It's powered by an "advanced" Qualcomm Snapdragon platform and equipped with a mini-projector that takes the place of a smartphone screen, along with a camera and speaker. It can perform functions like AI-powered optical recognition, but is also supposedly "privacy-first" thanks to qualities like no wake word and thus no "always on" listening."
Artificial Intelligence
Pulumi raises $41M in funding to grow infrastructure-as-code automation in the cloud 
The startup has emerged as a key player in the IaC market, selling tools to help companies automate the management of their cloud computing environments. More specifically, Pulumi’s tools make it easier for teams to use code to provision and manage cloud infrastructure, instead of adjusting hundreds of settings manually.
Cloud
Cohesity expands Data Security Alliance with new data security posture management vendors 
Cohesity launched the Data Security Alliance in November. The initial members of the alliance included a long list of security firms: BigID Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., CyberArk Software Ltd., Okta Inc., Palo Alto Networks Inc., Securonix Inc., Splunk Inc. and Tenable Inc. Google LLC’s Mandiant and PricewaterhouseCoopers International Ltd. are also participants through a security advisory relationship. The DSPM providers joining the alliance today include Cyera Inc., Dig Security Inc., Normalyze Inc., Sentra Inc. and Securiti Inc.
Data Management
Helios unveils AI analyst Cersi for tracking food supply chain disruptions
A new startup thinks it has developed a better way: today, Helios, co-founded by a former at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and a former award-winning machine learning engineer at Google, is introducing Cersi, which it bills as “the world’s first supply chain AI analyst.” Cersi is a conversational AI chatbot, similar to ChatGPT or Claude 2, but specialized for the agricultural supply chain.
Data & Analytics
Sapio Sciences Launches Scientific Data Cloud Made for Scientists, Sapio Jarvis
Sapio Sciences today announced the release of Sapio Jarvis. This revolutionary scientific data cloud empowers scientists to fully capitalize on research, development, and clinical data, organizations’ most precious resources. Jarvis cements Sapio’s first-ever lab triple-play solution, delivering LIMS, ELN, and enterprise scientific data management capabilities in a single, no-code platform.
Data & Analytics
AI startup SambaNova updates processor, software
Each SN40L processing unit is made up of 51 billion transistors (total 102 billion per package), which is a significant increase over the 43 billion transistors in the previous SN30 product. The SN40L also uses 64 GB of HBM memory, which is new to the SambaNova line, and offers more than 3x greater memory bandwidth to speed data in and out of the processing cores. It has 768 GB of DDR5 per processing unit (1.5 TB total) vs. 512 GB (1.0 TB) in the SN30.
Automation & Productivity
Nextdata Closes $12M in Seed Funding to Unlock the AI Revolution by Decentralizing Data at Scale
“Right now, the hype around AI isn’t rooted in reality for enterprises – despite decades of progress in data management technology, trusted data still isn’t accessible enough to support the AI revolution,” said Dehghani. “Decentralized data is the future, and Nextdata is empowering organizations to take the leap to data mesh with a new user experience data developers urgently need.
Data & Analytics
Frec steps out of stealth with $26M in funding, aiming to democratize sophisticated investing with AI
Founder and CEO of Frec, Mo Al Adham, told VentureBeat the startup’s approach is a means to “simplify the sophisticated investment products that have been traditionally only available via expensive white glove services.” Al Adham believes this could benefit the world at large, beyond the confines of wealth managers and family offices.
FinTech
RavenDB Launches Version 6.0 Lightning Fast Queries, Data Integrations, Corax Indexing Engine, and Sharding
Sharding: Version 6.0 introduces dynamic data distribution across multiple servers through sharding. This enables organizations to optimize performance and scalability like never before. Data operations can be scaled easily, giving businesses the capability to handle massive datasets adequately while maintaining top-notch system performance. Furthermore, sharding in RavenDB was explicitly designed to be tolerant for changing conditions and avoid costly re-sharding as you scale your systems.
Data & Analytics
Teradata and UiPath Partner to Help Businesses Automate Data-Driven Insights for ESG Initiatives
The wave of innovation spurred by generative AI and LLMs requires businesses to improve their data harmonization and analytics capabilities. UiPath customers are expected to benefit from Teradata’s expertise in enabling organizations to activate data and analytics, including for AI, at scale. The partnership will accelerate AI time to value by managing uncontrolled data growth and modernizing the IT environment, delivering flexibility with an open and connected ecosystem, and scaling AI innovation across the enterprise.
Data & Analytics
Assembly work instructions software startup Dirac launches with BuildOS 
Pitched as bringing work instructions into the 21st century, BuildOS has been designed to address the issue wherein assembly work instructions take weeks or months of manual, mind-numbing effort. Dirac argues that figuring out what order to assemble various parts, taking hundreds of screenshots of computer-aided design files and manually typing up each step-by-step direction are the dread of all mechanical and manufacturing engineers. That’s where BuildOS steps in.
Automation & Productivity
Google announces Chromebook Plus with boosted hardware specs and AI features 
The webcam is where the AI experience starts in order to make video calls better, with a 1080p camera built in. The company uses machine learning technology to allow users to enhance the clarity of the video, blur the background and even cancel background noise. All of this can be used irrespective of whatever meeting app the user is engaged in, since the option is built into ChromeOS itself.
Automation & Productivity
ChatGPT can now access up to date information
But until now the viral chatbot's "knowledge" has been frozen in time. Its database has been drawn from the contents of the internet as it was in September 2021. It could not browse the net in real time.
ChatGPT
New LogRhythm advancements aim to detect, investigate and respond to potential threats 
LogRhythm SIEM now provides integration of log source onboarding through centralized management. The enhanced SIEM capability eliminates the need for administrators to navigate several servers and user interfaces to complete onboarding, streamline workflows through a single interface, increase productivity and reduce the administrative process by half, according to the company.
Security
Zapier Announces General Availability of Tables and Introduces AI-powered Flowchart Tool, Canvas
 Zapier, the leader in easy automation, announced the general release of Tables to all users and its new product, Canvas. Tables is an automation-first database allowing users to easily and reliably move data in and out of the 6000+ apps on Zapier’s platform. With Tables, users can store, edit, share, and create automated workflows with their data all in one place.
Automation & Productivity
CobbleStone Software Releases IntelliDraft AI – The Generative AI for Contract Clauses
IntelliDraft AI serves as a powerful legal clause library that users can search thousands of real-life contract clauses from. IntelliDraft AI not only allows users to search through potentially beneficial clauses, it also allows users to generate their own clauses as well.
Automation & Productivity
Move Over, MOVEit: Critical Progress Bug Infests WS_FTP Software
For the second time in recent months, Progress Software is requiring enterprise security teams to drop everything and move quickly to protect their organizations against critical vulnerabilities in its file-transfer software — this time, the WS_FTP file transfer product used by some 40 million people.
Security
New NSA center will oversee development and integration of AI capabilities 
The threats from foreign intelligence are real, with the NSA warning on Sept. 27 that an alleged Chinese-linked hacking group is actively targeting and exploiting routers, particularly those from Cisco Systems Inc. The advisory claimed that BlackTech, also known as Palmerworm, Temp.Overboard, Circuit Panda and Radio Panda have demonstrated capabilities in modifying router firmware without detection.
Security
Transfr Closes $40 Million in Series C Growth Funding to Enable Career Mobility for Undiscovered Talent Through Its Virtual Reality Platform
Transfr’s mission is to scale access to quality education and employment for everyone, regardless of their background or location. The company developed an innovative VR-based platform, which hosts over 300 simulations that focus on careers that do not require a four-year degree. It has established a first-mover advantage in the Career Training and Education (CTE) market, with VR simulation training seeing $263 billion in global spending annually with an opportunity for rapid growth.
Training & Certs
Tquila Automation raises $20M in Series A funding, acquires healthcare intelligent automation leader Element Blue
“The acquisition of Element Blue realizes our strategy of building industry specialist capability across the US and Europe. Every sector has very specific needs when it comes to intelligent automation, and healthcare is no exception. It brings together two UiPath specialists to deliver enhanced value and a broader range of capabilities for clients. We’re stronger as one.”
Automation & Productivity
Meta Quest 3’s mixed reality ‘passthrough’ broadens workplace appeal
Meta’s latest headset is pitched primarily at consumers. But as with other devices in its AR/VR portfolio, the Quest is also suited to immersive training for employees — and improved ‘passthrough’ capabilities make collaboration a more realistic possibility.
Automation & Productivity
Aporia adds protection against AI hallucinations 
AI Guardrails, released Sept. 27, can be integrated into any generative AI product and positioned between the large language model and the end user. Aporia said it ensures fair and responsible usage by eliminating discriminatory or inappropriate LLM and chatbot responses depending on the standards of the workplace. It’s also intended to reduce the risk of data leakage and protect against the inadvertent disclosure of sensitive information such as credit card or medical data, a feature that the company said guarantees user safety and helps optimize performance.
Artificial Intelligence
Intel begins mass-producing chips using cutting-edge EUV technology 
Intel’s Leixlip fab will initially use the new production equipment to make Meteor Lake laptop processors (pictured). The chips are based on the company’s Intel 4 process, which corresponds to rivals’ seven-nanometer nodes. Each Meteor Lake processor comprises five miniature chips, or chiplets. Four contain computing components and the fifth functions as the foundation on which the others sit.
Automation & Productivity
AWS reveals details of ‘MadPot’ tools used to thwart thousands of cyberattacks 
MadPot has its origins in the late 2010s and uses intelligence gathered from a vast array of sensors deployed across AWS infrastructure. It monitors and analyzes potential threat interactions in real time to ensure the safety and integrity of its network and its customers. The service was built to accomplish two things: discover and monitor threat activities, and disrupt harmful activities whenever possible to protect AWS customers and others.
Security
Scammers target Microsoft’s AI chatbot Bing Chat with malicious ads 
In one example (pictured), Bing Chat delivered a malicious ad when asked for details on where to download a program called Advance IP scanner. The ad itself appears to be legitimate but it takes users to a phishing site that also serves malware.
Security
DataStax takes aim at event driven AI with open source LangStream project
The LangStream project was quietly soft launched by DataStax on Sept. 13 and the effort has iterated rapidly in the weeks since, with a new release out today that expands integration points to make the technology more useful. LangStream initially only worked with DataStax’s AstraDB database and now it supports a series of vector databases including Milvus as well as Pinecone.
Data & Analytics
T-Mobile takes unique approach to SASE with Versa partnership
The T-Mobile Secure Access Service Edge is being positioned as a network management and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) platform. It’s designed to support enterprise customers in securely connecting employees, systems and endpoints to remote networks, corporate applications and company resources.
Security
AI startup Cohere takes on OpenAI with new Chat API and Coral demo chatbot 
Cohere said one of the main advantages of its new Chat API is its Retrieval-Augmented Generation or RAG capability. This gives developers a way to control which data sources the chatbot uses when responding to specific prompts. It means they have a simple way to restrict their chat applications to use only the data they supply to it.
Artificial Intelligence
Revefi Unveils Data Operations Cloud to Redefine Data Quality and Cost Management
Unpredictable, and often unwarranted, costs are another massive business pain point because it’s not viable for organizations to proactively set and manage limits for their data warehouse users. There is limited visibility today into why and how these services are being used. As a result, businesses are frequently surprised by their data warehouse service provider bills, which can rapidly snowball out of control, in some cases adding tens of thousands of dollars to their bills in just one weekend.
Data Management
Amazon rolls out new features and public release of Bedrock to help organizations leverage generative AI 
Amazon Bedrock is the company’s fully managed service for generative AI that provides access to foundational models. Customers can use the service to discover, train and fine-tune their models with their own proprietary data on Amazon’s high-performance infrastructure in a secure environment all without the need to spin up or manage anything.
Artificial Intelligence
Vise Intelligence is a new AI to assist — not replace — financial advisors
Now, Vise is ready for a big comeback and more focused than ever with the release of its new AI service, Vise Intelligence, a conversational AI model designed to support human financial advisors by preparing them reports, answering their questions, and surfacing up-to-the-minute information about investment portfolios to go over with their clients.
FinTech
Aporia Unveils New Guardrails Solution to Control Generative AI Performance
AI Guardrails seamlessly integrates into any generative AI product, positioned between the large language model (LLM) and the end user. It drives fair and responsible usage by eliminating discriminatory or NSFW (Not Safe for Work) LLM/chatbot responses. Additionally, by managing the risks of data leakage and ensuring the security of sensitive information such as credit card or medical data, this dual-layered protection guarantees the safety of end users and upholds brand integrity by ensuring optimal performance.
Artificial Intelligence
Panzura gets edgy with smartphone and tablet access
The company has a CloudFS global cloud file services product based on AWS, providing file-based collaboration services. File data is stored in AWS in immutable object form. Analytics and governance data services are layered on this platform with access applications, AKA Smart Apps, for data access, collaboration, and monitoring. They provide isolated multi-company file sharing zones, content search, ransomware protection, and an edge application
Automation & Productivity
Generative AI cybersecurity startup Nexusflow raises $10.6M
The 95% accuracy in NexusRaven enables enterprises to synthesize fragmented data from various knowledge sources and software tools, accelerating team decision-making and streamlining security operations workflows. The latest release, NexusRaven-13B, is also said to deliver significantly lower costs and faster inference speed than GPT-4.
Security
MOVEit Breach Victims Continue to Come to Light
The nonprofit initiated an investigation and determined on June 20 that an unauthorized party obtained data from its MOVEit environment. The letter lists information impacted by the breach, including names, dates of birth, contact information, Social Security numbers, student ID numbers, and school-related records.
Security
Automated healthcare? Plenful emerges from stealth with $10M to streamline medical admin
Plenful’s platform sits on top of both unstructured (faxes/PDFs) and structured (like data from EHRs and pharmacy management software) healthcare data, tapping AI with human oversight to automate tasks such as document data entry for onboarding and referral management, 340B auditing and savings identification and identification of revenue optimization opportunities, instead of leaving all of this data entry and organization work to be done manually and tediously.
Automation & Productivity
AlphaSense secures $150M at $2.5B valuation for its market intelligence platform 
Alongside document-based data, AlphaSense’s platform offers access to what it describes as an expert network. The network includes more than one million executives and other experts who can brief investors about the happenings in a market of interest. A fund manager considering buying shares in a chipmaker, for example, could find semiconductor industry executives who can discuss the chipmaker’s long-term growth prospects.
Data & Analytics
US and Japan warns that Chinese-linked hacking group is targeting routers 
BlackTech actors use custom malware, dual-use tools and living-off-the-land tactics, such as disabling logging on routers, to conceal their operations. The advisory provides details on BlackTech’s tactics, techniques and procedures and highlights the need for corporations to review all subsidiary connections and verify access.
Security
Google to block Bard conversations from being indexed on Search
Further, Simon in a separate tweet suggested that the accidental leaking of conversations may not occur with Microsoft’s ChatGPT, which incidentally has more users, due to the presence of an extra line of code — ="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" — that excludes conversations from search results.
ChatGPT
OpenAI lets ChatGPT loose on the internet to search for up-to-date information 
However, OpenAI pulled the plug on the Browsing plugin just days after it was launched, when it realized that it was being used by many to bypass the paywalls of many websites. The feature is making a reappearance, with the company apparently finding a way to ensure it cannot get past those paywalls. According to OpenAI, ChatGPT now recognizes the “robots.txt” code that’s used by website owners to prevent search engine crawlers from indexing their subscription-only content.
ChatGPT
API connectivity king Kong announces dedicated cloud infrastructure and AI developer tooling 
APIs can be accessed via Kong’s Gateways platform, and with the release of Dedicated Cloud Gateways, users can now run it on their own, dedicated cloud-hosted servers. This means the infrastructure it sits on is exclusively reserved for each customer, the company explained. Because users won’t have to share server resources with anyone else, it’s ideal for the needs of larger enterprises that require heightened connectivity, performance, security and control.
Automation & Productivity
Revefi secures $10.5M in seed funding, launches AI-powered enterprise data platform
The product’s broad applicability is another key point of differentiation. “Our customers range from companies early in their journey to $10 billion public companies. Our target persona is a data engineering team or data infrastructure team leader responsible for getting data into a cloud data warehouse for business purposes,”
Data & Analytics
Meta introduces mixed reality Quest 3 headset and next generation of Ray-Ban smart glasses 
Meta used a next-gen pancake lens optical design stack design to give it a 40% slimmer profile than the Meta Quest 2 and boost its sharpness by over 25% with a reduction in visual artifacts. This also means that it can be more easily fitted over a user’s prescription glasses. For those who do not want to wear their glasses with the Quest 3, there is also a line of VR lenses that can be fitted into the headset as well.
Automation & Productivity
HPE restructures around hybrid cloud
The company is creating a new hybrid cloud business unit that includes HPE storage, HPE GreenLake cloud services solutions, and the office of the CTO. "This new group will accelerate our hybrid cloud strategy as we deliver one portfolio of storage, software, data, and cloud services on the HPE GreenLake platform,"
Cloud
The Raspberry Pi 5 is finally here
Despite doubts that the Raspberry Pi 5 would launch this year, the latest version of the microcomputer has arrived with some notable upgrades at a $60 starting price. Not only is it supposed to perform better than its predecessor, but it’s also the first Raspberry Pi to come with in-house silicon.
Automation & Productivity
Meta rolls out AI experiences across its apps and devices 
With a new feature, select users over the next month will be able to create AI generated stickers in WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Facebook Stories using English prompts just by typing in whatever they want. Using technology that combines Llama 2 and Emu, it will turn whatever they type into high quality emoji stickers that they can then embed in their text messages and stories.
Artificial Intelligence
Mistral AI releases open-source language model with 7B parameters 
The company says Mistral 7B can generate prose, summarize documents and perform other text processing tasks. It’s also capable of autocompleting software code written by developers. The model has a context length of 8k, which means that each prompt entered by users may contain up to 8,000 tokens.
Automation & Productivity
AI-powered B2B payments startup Slope raises $30M for product development 
Slope’s platform provides secure payment processing with AI support, which is used to detect fraudulent activities and optimize transaction workflows. It uses generative AI to power B2B checkout, customer and vendor risk assessment, payment reconciliation and cash management to drive digital transformation.
FinTech
Workday unveils new HR-focused generative AI features
The enterprise management platform vendor today announced a suite of new generative AI features aimed at “increasing productivity” and “streamlining business processes.” Soon, Workday customers will be able to automatically compare signed contracts against contracts in Workday to surface discrepancies, create personalized knowledge management articles and generate statements of work for service procurement.
Automation & Productivity
Infosys Collaborates With Microsoft to Accelerate and Democratize Industry-Wide Adoption of Generative AI
“Infosys Topaz is empowering businesses with improved operational efficiencies and reduced time-to-market for launching new products and services. It converges the power of Infosys Cobalt and data analytics to AI-power business and deliver cognitive solutions and intuitive experiences that revitalize growth."
Automation & Productivity
Oracle Cloud delivers Nvidia-powered generative AI service
OCI Generative AI is a managed service built on Oracle's cloud infrastructure in collaboration with Cohere, an AI platform for enterprise. The managed service and Cohere models will work in conjunction with AI Vector Search, a feature of Oracle Database 23c that provides retrieval augmented generation (RAG), an AI technique that combines pretrained LLMs and proprietary business data to deliver responses with higher accuracy.
Artificial Intelligence
SAP Announces New Generative AI Assistant Joule
Joule will be embedded throughout SAP’s cloud enterprise portfolio, delivering proactive and contextualised insights from across the breadth and depth of SAP solutions and third-party sources. By quickly sorting through and contextualising data from multiple systems to surface smarter insights, Joule helps people get work done faster and drive better business outcomes in a secure, compliant way
Automation & Productivity
New ZenRAT Malware Targeting Windows Users via Fake Password Manager Software
A noteworthy aspect of the campaign is that users who end up visiting the deceptive website from non-Windows systems are redirected to a cloned opensource.com article published in March 2018 about "How to manage your passwords with Bitwarden, a LastPass alternative."
Security
NTT DOCOMO and Nvidia partner to launch the first AI-powered 5G network 
Japanese telecom giant NTT DOCOMO broke new ground this week at MWC Las Vegas by deploying the first 5G network to use graphics processing unit-accelerated wireless technology in a commercial setting.
5G
SiMa.ai Debuts Palette Edgematic for Anyone to Simplify and Scale ML Applications at the Embedded Edge
SiMa.ai, the machine learning company delivering solutions for the embedded edge, launched Palette Edgematic, a free visual development environment designed for any organization to get started with and accelerate ML at the edge. With Palette Edgematic, SiMa is delivering an onramp to AI and ML at the edge via a no-code approach to creating, evaluating and fine-tuning ML applications from anywhere in the world via a secure browser.
Automation & Productivity
The CIA says it’s building a ChatGPT-style generative AI chatbot to aid data analysts 
The CIA’s chatbot will leverage advanced generative artificial intelligence to help its agents access and understand open-source data, the agency said. The technology was developed by the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise unit, and will roll out the chatbot to multiple intelligence agencies besides the CIA, as part of an ongoing effort to rival the growing, AI-powered intelligence capabilities of China.
Artificial Intelligence
WiMi Developed Deep-Mining Backtracking Search Optimization Algorithm Guided by Collective Intelligence
CIGBSA introduces topological dyadic learning operators and linear combination strategies that enable the algorithm to more accurately assess the quality of the solution and guide the learning of individuals. This learning mechanism accelerates the learning process of the algorithm, allowing individuals to adapt faster to the characteristics of the problem, improving the quality of the solution and the performance of the algorithm.
Automation & Productivity
Microsoft harnesses power of AI to boost Windows 11 security, pushes for passwordless future
Microsoft announced a series of new enterprise security features today that use artificial intelligence (AI) to help defend Windows 11 against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. The tech giant claims its new AI capabilities will reduce security incidents by 60% and firmware attacks by 300% for businesses using the latest version of its software.
Security
Cogito’s DataSum brings fair practices to AI data-labeling industry
DataSum is a certification framework designed to audit and validate training data at various touchpoints in the data pipeline. McMullen said it focuses on best practices and adheres to ethical guidelines, methodologies and standards to help ensure the development of responsible, transparent and unbiased training data.
Artificial Intelligence
Oops! Google Search caught publicly indexing users’ conversations with Bard AI
This means that if a person used Bard to ask it a question — possibly even a question related to the contents of their private emails — then shared the link with a designated third-party, say, their spouse, friend or business partner, the conversation accessible at that link could in turn be scraped by Google’s crawler and show up publicly, to the entire world, in its Search Results.
Privacy & Security
ShadowSyndicate: A New Cybercrime Group Linked to 7 Ransomware Families
The actor, active since July 16, 2022, has linked to ransomware activity related to Quantum, Nokoyawa, BlackCat, Royal, Cl0p, Cactus, and Play strains, while also deploying off-the-shelf post-exploitation tools like Cobalt Strike and Sliver as well as loaders such as IcedID and Matanbuchus.
Security
New Exabeam cybersecurity features address limitations to legacy systems 
A new feature called Threat Explainer quickly and accurately classifies threats and clearly articulates business risk. Threat Explainer leverages historical data to summarize incidents into simple narratives and highly tailored recommendations for best remediation actions.
Security
Tailscale, Mullvad partner to deliver secure, private web browsing
Tailscale provides software that creates a peer-to-peer mesh VPN, which allows for customers to create direct connections between devices. Tailscale enables encrypted point-to-point connections using the opensource WireGuard protocol, which means only devices on a private network can communicate with each other. WireGuard is an open-source project that is designed for quick reconnections, which improves reliability. WireGuard is also supported by consumer-grade VPN provider Mullvad.
Network Management
Confluent launches new initiative to deliver fresh, real-time data streams for enterprise AI apps
The first partners to have joined the initiative are MongoDB, Pinecone, Rockset, Weaviate and Zilliz. Confluent says this is just the beginning of their effort to help any business take advantage of real-time AI and more team-ups and innovations will be announced in the future.
Data & Analytics
T-Mobile targets SIM-based hardware for SASE, network slicing security
The SIM card-based service, called T-Mobile Secure Access Service Edge, is being positioned as a network management and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) platform. It’s designed to support enterprise customers in securely connecting employees, systems and endpoints to remote networks, corporate applications and company resources.
Security
UnitQ’s new AI assistant surfaces customer insights from across channels
This week, the five-year-old startup UnitQ announced a new chatbot, UnitQ GPT, powered by a combination of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo model and proprietary machine learning (ML) models for analysis, that provides any employee access to insights without requiring data science expertise.
Data & Analytics
Atlassian adds new collaboration and integration features to Jira platforms
Additionally, a new overview feature allows users to combine any number of projects into a single aggregated project, creating a shared timeline or calendar in which project managers can see every team’s work. A summary tab provides a centralized hub where leaders can access insights into ongoing projects, such as priority breakdowns and team workloads.
Automation & Productivity
Toshiba’s 22TB disk drive arrives, catching it up to Seagate, WD
Basically the drive adds 10 percent capacity to its existing 3.5-inch form-factor MG10 range, which tops out at with a 20TB model announced a year ago. Like that drive it is an enterprise capacity or nearline product, spinning at 7,200rpm with up to 10 platters, and either 12Gbit/s SAS (2 to 22TB) and 6Gbit/s SATA (1 to 22 TB) interfaces.
Data Storage
New Baffle Data Protection for AI secures private data in generative AI projects 
With Baffle Data Protection for AI, sensitive data is encrypted with the advanced encryption standard algorithm as it’s ingested into the data pipeline. When this data is used in a generative AI service, sensitive data values are anonymized, so leakage of cleartext data — information stored or sent in unencrypted form — cannot occur even with prompt engineering or adversarial prompting.
Security
Vectara grounds AI accuracy with Boomerang vector embedding
“It’s a retrieval mode, it’s fundamentally there to serve the following purpose, the user sends a query into some kind of knowledge base and relevant information comes back out of the knowledge base,” Amin Ahmad, co-founder and CTO of Vectara told VentureBeat. “So there’s that kind of boomeranging action.”
Artificial Intelligence
Immersive Labs unveils new AI-ready ‘Workforce Exercising’ cybersecurity training solution 
Workforce Exercising is said to allow cyber leaders to assess different departments, such as high-value targets like finance and supply chain teams, to gain insights through the Immersive Labs Resilience Score to identify and fill skills gaps before it’s too late.
Security
ChatGPT goes multimodal: now supports voice, image uploads
The move will give users the ability to have back-and-forth conversations with ChatGPT – in a way similar to how they talk to Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, or Google Assistant – and ask for the bot to analyze and react to any image they upload, such as translating signage or identifying objects when asked by the user in text accompanying their image upload.
ChatGPT
‘Ransomed.vc’ ransomware gang claims to have hacked Sony
Sony is not the only company listed on the Ransomed.vc dark web site. The group also claims to have hacked Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo and is demanding a ransom payment of $1.015 million not to release stolen data. There are also dozens of other victims listed on the site, although most are small companies.
Security
IBM updates tools to move next-gen AI development onto the mainframe 
They include a pair of new developer toolkits that support the most widely used AI frameworks and the Python programming language, enhancements to Machine Learning for z/OS, and performance improvements within the IBM z/OS operating system that’s used by mainframes.
Automation & Productivity
Komprise Introduces Storage Insights to Unify Data and Storage Management
Komprise announced the general availability of Storage Insights, the industry’s first unified, consistent view of both data usage and storage consumption across vendors and clouds without having to contend with multiple consoles and multiple storage consumption definitions.
Data Storage
Symantec integrates Google Cloud Security AI for better threat analysis 
Under the partnership Symantec will leverage the Google Cloud Security AI Workbench and security-specific large language model Sec-PaLM 2–across its portfolio. The aim is to enable natural language interfaces and generate more comprehensive and easy-to-understand threat analyses.
Security
Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Airkit.ai
“Adam and team have a strong understanding of the Customer 360 Platform and are some of the best technologists we have worked with in helping Salesforce customers connect with their own customers in a whole new way."
Automation & Productivity
Dell expands APEX portfolio to extend Microsoft Azure Cloud to the edge 
It’s the first offering from Dell’s recently announced Dell APEX Cloud Platform. It provides a range of infrastructure offerings for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, a hyperconverged infrastructure platform that customers can run in their on-premises data centers.I
Cloud
Series raises $25M in funding to replace ERP systems and revolutionize financial operations
“The magic of Series is the holistic suite — the more products that a customer uses, the less time they have to spend using each product and can actually focus on the core of their business.”
Automation & Productivity
Canonical steps up its support for machine learning development with Charmed MLFlow 
Charmed MLFlow’s first function is to track experiments, record and compare parameters and results. It also helps package machine learning code in a reusable, reproducible form so it can be shared with other data scientists or transferred to production.
Machine Learning
Confluent debuts managed Apache Flink service and generative AI features 
Confluent’s flagship product is a managed data streaming platform called Confluent Cloud. It promises to reduce the amount of development work involved in moving data between applications. Confluent Cloud was originally based on Kafka but now uses a different data streaming engine called Kora that the company describes as faster and more cost-efficient
Data & Analytics
Amazon will invest up to $4 billion into OpenAI rival Anthropic
Anthropic’s Claude and Claude 2 large language model–based chatbots are similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard in that they can translate text, write code, and answer various questions, but Anthropic says its model is safer and more reliable because it’s guided by a set of principles, allowing it to revise responses by itself instead of relying on human moderators
Artificial Intelligence
Virtual threads lead Java 21 dev news from Oracle CloudWorld
“Rather than a one-to-one mapping between platforms, threads and Java threads, you can now have thousands, or tens of thousands of Java threads, mapping to a lot more threads. And that means that programmers can write a simple, synchronous style of code that’s easy to read, easy to write, easy to understand, easy to do, and have that scale really, really well.”
DevOps
Mappedin Empowers Communities to Map Every Building With Game-Changing App
Prior to Mappedin Maker, the company’s acclaimed indoor mapping platform was accessible only to enterprise companies with professional expertise. In a strategic shift, Mappedin has democratized this technology to be available to anyone. With the introduction of this free application, Mappedin Maker extends to everyone, enabling the creation of accurate, interactive maps that reshape the way individuals navigate and engage with indoor environments.
Automation & Productivity
Meta will reportedly release AI-enabled chatbots at upcoming Connect Conference 
Meta is reportedly planning dozens of AI “personality chatbots,” including one called “Bob the Robot” with “superior intellect, sharp wit, and biting sarcasm,” which is similar to the character Bender from the cartoon series “Futurama.” Meta is also said to be working on a product that allows celebrities and creators to make their own AI chatbots to interact with fans and followers.
Artificial Intelligence
Wondershare FamiSafe 7.0 Safeguarding Children with AI
The app empowers parents to block inappropriate content like pornography and violence, safeguarding their children from harmful online material. Additionally, the newly integrated AI assistant monitors and analyzes children’s device search history, issuing early warnings to parents regarding unsuitable content.
Privacy & Security
NeuroBlade aims to be ‘the Nvidia of data analytics’
The startup has developed a specialized semiconductor chip to accelerate SQL instruction processing. It plugs into a host server’s PCIe bus and transparently takes over the SQL-related processing with no host application software changes. The device is emphatically not a DPU (data processing unit) which offloads general infrastructure processing, including security, networking and storage, from a host x86 server, nor is it a SmartNIC running networking faster.
Data & Analytics
Harness debuts new code management tools for its software delivery platform 
Implementing the methodology requires specialized software tools that can take upwards of weeks to deploy. Harness offers a CI/CD platform that it says can be set up in a few hours. The company, which is backed by more than $350 million in funding, also provides tools that ease other engineering tasks such as reducing an application’s cloud infrastructure usage.
DevOps
Roblox acquires voice tech startup Speechly to add voice chat moderation to its platform
The Helsinki, Finland-based Speechly offers cutting-edge voice chat moderation, real-time transcription, and Voice API which enable various enterprises to seamlessly integrate AI voice capabilities and voice interfaces into their respective products and immersive experiences.
Automation & Productivity
Mesh raises $22M for platform that helps businesses manage digital assets 
Using Mesh’s platform, businesses can let customers deposit, hold and move digital assets across different platforms, assets that can include cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum. The system is embeddable into customers’ existing infrastructure and apps, which allows them to perform payments and transfers as well as interact with more than 300 cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets without leaving their own system.
FinTech
Google’s Bard chatbot can now find answers in your Gmail, Docs, Drive
Bard’s extensions aren’t limited to just Gmail, Docs, and Drive, either. Google also announced that the chatbot will also connect with Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights. This means you can now ask Bard to pull real-time flight information, find nearby attractions, surface YouTube videos on a certain topic, and a lot more. Google will enable these three extensions by default.
Automation & Productivity
Solidigm SSD looks to outpace rivals on random writes
Solidigm positions the drive as a fast write cache sitting in front of slower mass capacity QLC (4bits/cell) drives such as its own 61.4TB D5-P5336. The D7-P5810 can also be used in high-performance computing (HPC) applications.
Data Storage
Amazon leader says new Gen AI Alexa is a ‘super agent’
The multimodal, multilingual and multifaceted model is “is hugely complex,” he said, combining computer vision, natural language processing and pattern recognition. Yet, he added, it is the “complex being made simple” for users and developers.
Automation & Productivity
Secoda raises $14M to bring AI-driven, Google-like search to enterprise data
“Secoda does not simply give you information, but gives you answers, much like Google…Our customers have been able to leverage the platform to reduce the volume of inbound data requests by over 40%, reduce onboarding times by 50%, and reduce time teams spend on documentation by 90% — huge time savings for data teams,"
Data Management
AnswerRocket’s GenAI Assistant Revolutionizes Enterprise Data Analysis
Max offers a user-friendly chat experience for data analysis that integrates AnswerRocket’s augmented analytics with OpenAI’s GPT large language model, making sophisticated data analysis more accessible than ever. With Max, users can ask questions about their key business metrics, identify performance drivers, and investigate critical issues within seconds.
Data & Analytics
ibi Unleashes the Power of Legacy Systems with Open Data Hub for Mainframe
A breakthrough solution for organizations struggling with data retrieval from legacy data environments, the offering revolutionizes the access and utilization of mainframe data by directly bringing this data into web-based business analytics capabilities.
Data & Analytics
Cisco boosts its cybersecurity and AI ambitions with $28B acquisition of Splunk 
Cisco faces a huge array of cybersecurity companies, including a few large and similarly voracious rivals such as Palo Alto Networks Inc., CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., Fortinet Inc. and Zscaler Inc. in addition to some of the largest software and cloud computing companies such as Microsoft Corp., Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC.
Security
Services at MGM Resorts restored following ransomware attack 
“This incident starkly emphasizes the pressing need for robust investment in cyber infrastructure, including regular security audits and thorough employee training programs, to fortify defenses and effectively combat future cyberthreats. Without such measures, the risk of extensive downtime and financial losses remains a looming threat.”
Security
Harness debuts new code management tools for its software delivery platform
The open-source Gitness tool that Harness debuted today is designed to help developers manage their code files. Similarly to GitHub, it allows software teams to store all of an application’s code in a single repository for easy access. Built-in collaboration features enable team members to review one another’s software changes for errors before releasing them.
DevOps
ServiceNow embeds AI-powered customer-assist features throughout products
ServiceNow's new chatbot works across applications and can summarize customer service interactions and perform case, incident, and agent chat summarizations; act as a virtual agent; and perform search functions.
Automation & Productivity
Planck Launches the First GenAI-Enhanced Underwriting Workbench
Planck PLUS is both a strategic toolkit and a trusted co-pilot that leverages the latest AI technologies and proprietary machine learning models to set a new standard in underwriting risk research, insight generation, data attribution transparency, and automation.
Automation & Productivity
Starburst Expands Data Lake Analytics Platform to Support Every Stage of the Cloud Journey
“Our new on-prem connectivity means that Galaxy users can now connect to their on-prem data stores and glean value from that data while continuing the cloud migration journey. This connectivity is highly differentiated from other products on the market that require all data to be in a centralized cloud in order to extract its value.”
Data & Analytics
Creatio’s Quantum update lets enterprises deploy composable no-code apps
Its no-code approach means you or your company admin don’t need extensive software or computer science experience or even training — simply select the apps offering the capabilities you need, hook up your data, and you’re off to the races.
Automation & Productivity
Joint FBI and CISA advisory warns of Snatch ransomware operation 
Snatch threat actors are said to be consistently evolving their tactics to take advantage of current trends in the cybercriminal space and have leveraged the successes of other ransomware operations. Affiliates using Snatch have targeted critical infrastructure sectors, including companies and organizations in the defense, food and agriculture and information technology sectors.
Security
ServiceNow Vancouver launches with domain-specific generative AI smarts, new automation tools
While ServiceNow started working on LLM capabilities years ago when it acquired Element AI, the company’s first generative AI move took shape in May 2023 when it announced Now Assist for Search, a platform offering that provided natural language responses based on a customer’s own knowledge base. It was backed by ServiceNow’s Generative AI Controller, which allowed organizations to connect their instances to both Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and OpenAI API LLMs and featured built‑in actions for faster intelligent workflow automation.
Automation & Productivity
Lenovo Delivers AI at the Edge, Bringing Next-Generation Intelligence to Data
New Lenovo TruScale for Edge and AI brings the proven cost benefits of Lenovo TruScale’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service model to the broadest and most comprehensive edge portfolio on the market, enabling customers to leverage a pay-as-you-go model to quickly deploy powerful edge computing and gain AI-powered insights directly at the source of data creation.
Data & Analytics
OpenAI debuts new DALL-E 3 AI image generator 
The new model can not only understand more complicated prompts than earlier neural neutrals but also generate higher-quality output. In one internal test, the company entered the same prompt into DALL-E 3 and a previous-generation neural network it released last year. The former model generated a higher-quality image.
Artificial Intelligence
trender.ai Launches First All-In-One Contact Intelligence Platform for B2B Tech Sales Teams
The Trender platform finds and provides a rich snapshot of each buyer to better qualify, personalize, engage, and monitor throughout the deal cycle. It combines the best in search, natural language processing, LLM, and generative AI in a patented solution that aggregates buyer data to deliver unique insights.
Automation & Productivity
Infinidat adds AFA inside hybrid InfiniBox
Infinidat’s hybrid InfiniBox array is primarily disk-based and has a flash cache with Neural Cache software that loads read data into memory data for the lowest possible latency access – down to 35 microseconds.
Data Storage
Neuralink is now searching for human volunteers for its brain-computer interface trials 
The Link, a tiny implant that will process and translate a person’s neural signals, will be connected to a series of very small threads that will be inserted into the volunteers’ brains. It’s hoped from there, the person will be able to control a computer or other devices. The system is hailed as a possible victory over nature with technology if, indeed, it is successful.
Emerging Tech
Data infrastructure and analytics startup MotherDuck raises $52.5M 
DuckDB is an in-process SQL Online Analytical Processing database management system known for its simplicity, rich features and speed. It’s designed to handle complex analytical queries on large datasets efficiently.
Data & Analytics
Juniper improves intent-based networking platform (what’s new in Apstra?)
Intent-based networking starts with the network operator defining their intent or design for the network through a simple graphical user interface in Apstra. Baker noted that this intent becomes the single source of truth for network configurations and that single source of truth is held in Apstra’s graph database.
Network Management
Application security posture management platform startup Legit Security raises $40M 
The service delivers visibility and security control over changing development environments with a unified application security control plane, the company claims, leveraging valuable context and traceability from code to the cloud to prioritize security issues and streamline vulnerability management.
Security
Bit Builders, Delivers Turnkey Image Fraud Detection with OrboGraph
At the heart of the OrboGraph AI solution are deep learning models called OrbNet Forensic AI technology. Known for its state-of-the-art fraud detection and prevention capabilities, OrbNet Forensic AI scrutinizes image payment transactions with detection levels of 95%+ on targeted use cases delivering protection to clients of financial institutions.
Privacy & Security
HiddenLayer raises $50M to bolster defenses of enterprise AI models
These tools don’t actually access the models, nor compromise the proprietary data and technology of clients. Instead, they passively monitor the performance and operations of enterprises ML/AI models and linked applications in realtime, scanning overarching vulnerabilities and offering recommendations for hardening them, as well as detecting injection of malicious code/malware and deploying defense mechanisms to cut off the attackers and isolate any intrusions.
Security
OpenAI seeks diverse group of domain experts to help develop safer, more robust AI models 
Red teaming is a pivotal step in the AI model development process, and has taken on more importance as generative AI captures the imagination of the public. It involves putting AI models under intense scrutiny, and enables biases and vulnerabilities to be identified and resolved before anyone else discovers them.
Artificial Intelligence
Cato Networks raises $238M in equity, steers single-vendor SASE wave to $3B valuation
To address this issue “we have built this platform from the ground up as a converged networking and network security. And the value is the customer experience and the ability [to enable] IT security finally to move at the speed of bigger business and address the requirements they have within a limited budget,” he added.
Security
Cisco-F5 partnership yields secure, multisite load balancing technology
ACI is built on Cisco’s intent-based networking technology, which gives customers the ability to implement network and policy changes on the fly and ensure data delivery. ACI Multi-Site typically lets two geographically dispersed data centers link via L2/L3 networks and offers consistent policy enforcement across both sites. The Multi-Pod technology lets multiple groups of equipment within the individual data centers network with each other.
Network Management
Oracle offers alternative to SSO, updates cloud-native access governance
The service also is designed to identify potential risks based on the behavior of users or resources, Leung said. “Then over time, it uses machine learning to further recommend things” like granting a bit more access to a certain resource, or restricting access to data based on suspicious user activity. “It’ll save a huge amount of time for administrators, and overall, it improves security posture,” he said.
IT Management
Google’s Bard chatbot can now find answers in your Gmail, Docs, Drive
Google’s Bard AI chatbot is no longer limited to pulling answers from just the web — it can now scan your Gmail, Docs, and Drive to help you find the information you’re looking for. With the new integration, you can ask Bard to do things like find and summarize the contents of an email or even highlight the most important points of a document you have stored in Drive.
Automation & Productivity
Mosyle launches AI-driven zero trust platform for securing macOS against cyber threats
Over the last several years Mosyle has been building out a mobile device management (MDM) platform known as the Apple Unified Platform. In 2023, the company expanded its capabilities with generative AI to help improve MDM operations. The new Mosyle Automated Zero Trust solution announced today extends the company’s capabilities to help secure macOS devices and is powered by the company’s proprietary LeeryAI artificial intelligence (AI) engine.
Security
Tabular, the vendor-neutral data store based on Apache Iceberg, raises $26M in funding 
Iceberg is an open-source table format that provides full database functionality on top of cloud object stores, and has been widely adopted by Netflix, Amazon Web Services Inc., Snowflake Inc., Databricks Inc. and many other leading technology firms.
Data & Analytics
Qlik Announces Qlik Staige to Help Organizations Manage Risk, Embrace Complexity and Scale the Impact of AI
“Our competitors have made many announcements that promise future products or vision. Our difference is that Qlik customers are already using AI, including leveraging a proven and trusted LLM and a full range of AI-enhanced analytics. Additionally, with Qlik Staige, our customers and partners are transforming organizations – as evidenced by more than 100,000 AI models built using Qlik AutoML.”
Artificial Intelligence
Oracle taps generative AI to improve customer services and boost marketing and sales 
As for actually resolving issues, generative AI authoring will play a key role in helping product and service experts create step-by-step guidance, defining a consistent process agents can follow when attempting to find a solution to customer’s problems. For example, Oracle said, assisted authoring can help a manufacturing or tech company’s service administrator capture a standard set of steps that front-line support representatives must work through with a customer before they escalate the issue to an expert resource.
Automation & Productivity
Nokia Launches AVA Data Suite to Run on Google Cloud to Facilitate AI/ML Development
Nokia AVA Data Suite, derived from Nokia’s vast experience in building hundreds of network and subscriber experience use cases, seamlessly integrates with Google Cloud’s BigQuery and Vertex AI to create powerful AI/ML use cases that drive innovation in the telecommunications industry.
Automation & Productivity
Microsoft accidentally exposes 38TB of internal data via GitHub repository 
“The Microsoft developers used an Azure mechanism called ‘SAS tokens,’ which allows you to create a shareable link granting access to an Azure Storage account’s data — while upon inspection, the storage account would still seem completely private,” Wiz researchers wrote in a blog post today.
Security
Data management startup Alcion raises $21M for go-to-market expansion 
Alcion argues that the high-value and increasing amounts of business-critical data stored in Microsoft 365 make the service a prime target for malicious actors and new classes of ransomware. Although Microsoft ensures the reliability and availability of Microsoft 365 infrastructure, Alcion claims that it does not protect against cases in which cyberattacks or accidents lead to data loss.
Security
Kinetica Launches Native LLM for Language-to-SQL on Enterprise Data
Kinetica today announced a native Large Language Model (LLM) combined with Kinetica’s innovative architecture that allows users to perform ad-hoc data analysis on real-time, structured data at speed using natural language. Unlike with public LLMs, no external API call is required and data never leaves the customer’s environment. This announcement follows Kinetica’s earlier innovation as the first analytic database to integrate with OpenAI.
Data & Analytics
Betterleap leverages AI to revolutionize recruitment, launches with impressive $13M in seed funding
The San Francisco-based company says that it has built the world’s largest database of job candidates, with more than 1 billion records from various sources, such as Indeed, LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow and others. The platform also uses generative AI to provide recruiters with data-driven insights and automation, helping them discover the best candidates for their open roles and reach out to them effectively.
Automation & Productivity
Oracle strengthens identity management and gives customers keep-your-own-key capabilities 
Oracle said the cloud-native service provides detailed visibility into how users interact with those resources and reduces risk by allowing only authorized users to see or use restricted assets including source code, patents, databases, applications and infrastructure elements like cloud servers and services.
Cloud
Elon Musk says X users soon may have to pay a subscription fee to use the platform 
“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” he said. He explained that to create a bot only costs a “fraction of a penny,” but if the person or people behind the bot have to pay a small amount, “a few dollars or something,” that would price the bots off the platform.
Social Media
Enterprise-focused generative AI startup Writer raises $100M
All told, Writer offers 14 different AI models, including Palmyra Small, which is made up of 128 million parameters, Palmyra Base (5 billion parameters) and Palmyra Large (20 billion parameters). According to Writer, these models can help businesses do everything from create content and emails to transcribing audio and summarizing it.
Artificial Intelligence
Okta Agent Involved in MGM Resorts Breach, Attackers Claim
"MGM made the hasty decision to shut down each and every one of their Okta Sync servers after learning that we had been lurking in their Okta Agent servers sniffing passwords of people whose passwords couldn't be cracked from their domain controller hash dumps," ALPHV wrote on its leak site, in a statement that Emsisoft researcher Brett Callow tweeted out. "This resulted in their Okta being completely out."
Security
Industrial control system cybersecurity startup Dragos raises $74M 
The Dragos Platform offers industrial cybersecurity technology that gives customers visibility into their ICS/OT assets, vulnerabilities, threats and response actions. The company says the strength of the Dragos Platform comes from its ability to codify OT threat intelligence and insights from the Dragos services team into the software.
Security
Google streamlines Chronicle unifies, SIEM, SOAR and Mandiant intelligence
Each component such as SIEM, SOAR and attack surface management has its own console/dashboard. This unification eliminates the need for users to toggle between separate interfaces or products, streamlining the workflow for security operations. Alerts in Chronicle are now automatically grouped into cases on behalf of the users, making it easier for them to focus on triage and allowing for a more enriched and contextualized understanding of security events,
Security
Acronis aims cloud data services solution at smaller MSPs
Acronis says Advanced Automation is aimed at helping MSPs transition from simple break-fix services to cloud-centric, subscription-based services, but which require a streamlined approach to often complicated billing and contract management.
IT Management
timeOS wants to transform your calendar into an interactive assistant with AI
This week, the three-year-old Los Angeles-founded startup timeOS (formerly called Magical HQ) unveiled its new “TimeAI”, a Chrome browser extension designed to transform commonly used calendars and note-taking programs like those offered by Google and Notion, into dynamic assistants that can automatically provide relevant information during your meetings, summarize them, translate them into 60+ languages, even attend them on your behalf with a simple, static AI avatar that appears in place of you and silently transcribes what’s happening.
Automation & Productivity
Cisco snuffs HyperFlex development, hands HCI future to Nutanix
Cisco announced the end-of-sale and end-of-life dates for its HyperFlex Data Platform (HXDP); the last day to order any products related to the system is September 11, 2024, and the last day to renew to an existing subscription is February 28, 2029. Active customers will be able to continue receiving Cisco support as necessary.
Network Management
Copresence Announces Launch of Its Digital Avatar Creation App on Apple App Store
COPRESENCE AG (“copresence”), a provider of digital avatar generation software that creates photorealistic 3D models of a user’s face, has announced the open beta launch of its self-titled app on the Apple App Store. The copresence app is designed to create a true digital likeness of a user in minutes, for use across gaming, virtual, augmented and extended reality (VR/AR/XR), and video conferencing.
Automation & Productivity
Deci Unveils New Generative AI Foundation Models and Dev Suite, Enabling Rapid Performance and Cost Efficiency
By using Deci’s open-source generative models and Infery LLM, AI teams can reduce their inference compute costs by up to 80% and use widely available and cost-friendly GPUs such as the NVIDIA A10 while also improving the quality of their offering. The models introduced by Deci cater to diverse applications, ranging from content and code generation to image creation and chat applications, among many others.
Automation & Productivity
Automated evaluation and security platform startup Patronus AI launches with $3M in funding 
Patronus AI automates and scales the manual and costly model evaluation methods commonly found in enterprises to enable organizations to confidently deploy LLMs while minimizing the risk of model failures and misaligned outputs. The platform uses machine learning technology to test and score any language model in order to identify potential failures.
Artificial Intelligence
Oracle to colocate in Azure data centers under expanded Microsoft partnership 
The new offering, called Oracle Database@Azure, will give customers of both companies a low-latency option to comingle their data with Microsoft’s applications and infrastructure using the existing Azure portal, software development kits and application program interfaces.
Data Management
DoubleVerify to Protect Advertisers Against ‘Made for Advertising’ Content with Industry First Holistic Solution
DV developed its proprietary MFA analysis process based on a unique blend of human and artificial intelligence-based auditing. With this release, DV’s solution can be enabled directly by a customer in their brand safety and suitability profile for measurement and monitoring, and in DV Authentic Brand Suitability for pre-bid avoidance.
Marketing Tech
TikTok fined $367 million for how it handled children’s data
After consulting with the European Data Protection Board, the DPC found that TikTok set children’s accounts to public by default when they signed up on the platform. That meant that kids’ videos were publicly viewable by default and that comments, duets, and Stitch features were also enabled by default.
Data Privacy
Quantum provides plenty of solace to those seeking cheaper cold data
The ActiveScale offering claims to reduce cold storage costs by up to 60 percent through making it easier for organisations to dynamically move cold data across their own on-premises cloud infrastructure, rather than storing it in the public clouds run by the likes of AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Data Storage
CyberLink Unveils Major Generative AI Updates to its Suite of Innovative Multimedia Software Solutions
Accessible from the easiest editing interface yet, the brand-new AI Art Generator can instantly turn text prompts into captivating images and stickers. While previously complex workflows have been streamlined to one click, enabling users to auto-remove unwanted noises, restore audio, and auto-generate customizable subtitles for videos of any length in English, Japanese, or Chinese, for unmatched clarity for podcasts, voiceovers, narration, or dialogue.
Automation & Productivity
Data breach at Caesars Entertainment compromises customer information
Caesars is currently investigating whether the hackers may have stolen additional information. Currently, the company stated in its filing, there’s no indication that loyalty members’ account information, passwords or payment card details were accessed. Caesars added that the breach didn’t affect customer-facing operations across its properties and gaming applications.
Data Privacy
Esperanto Technologies Introduces 1st Generative AI Appliance Based on RISC-V
Esperanto’s Generative AI Appliance is an integrated software/hardware solution that can be installed in private datacenters or at the enterprise edge using an industry-standard server form factor. Because it is preloaded and self-contained, it delivers high levels of data privacy and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) while eliminating the need for developers to constantly download, port and tune the latest Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Models to expensive GPU-based hardware.
Artificial Intelligence
Databricks raises $500 million with backing from rival Snowflake’s top client
Founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark, an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing, Databricks is known for its “lakehouse” platform in the cloud — a combination of data warehouses and data lakes that unifies data, analytics and AI on a single platform so that customers can govern, manage and derive insights from enterprise data and build their own generative AI solutions faster.
Data & Analytics
'Scattered Spider' Behind MGM Cyberattack, Targets Casinos
"Scattered Spider (aka Roasted 0ktapus, UNC3944) leverages a combination of credential phishing and social engineering to capture one-time-password (OTP) codes, or it overwhelms targets using multifactor authentication (MFA) notification fatigue tactics,” according to a CrowdStrike report on the cybercrime group from January. “Having obtained access, the adversary avoids using unique malware, instead favoring a wide range of legitimate remote management tools to maintain persistent access.”
Security
New ‘3AM’ ransomware strain used in place of failed LockBit attack 
Detailed today by researchers from the Symantec Threat Hunting team, 3AM is written in the Rust programming language and is believed to be a completely new malware family. The ransomware attempts to stop multiple services on the infected computer before it begins encrypting files. Once encryption is complete, it attempts to delete Volume Shadow copies.
Security
Adobe publicly launches AI tools Firefly, Generative Fill in Creative Cloud overhaul
Central to the update is the official integration of Adobe Firefly, the company’s new AI engine, directly into Creative Cloud software. Firefly uses generative AI to allow users to create or modify images, graphics, and other media through simple text prompts. For example, a Photoshop user can now add or remove objects from an image by describing the changes in words.
Automation & Productivity
MGM Resorts breached by 'Scattered Spider' hackers: sources
"Although members of the group may be less experienced and younger than many of the established multifaceted extortion/ransomware groups and nation state espionage actors, they are a serious threat to large organizations in the U.S.," he added.
Security
Chrome, Firefox and other browsers affected by critical WebP vulnerability 
Brave Software Inc. and Vivaldi Technologies AS, two other browser makers, also rolled out updates this week after determining their applications are affected. Moreover, it’s believed that the impact of the WebP vulnerability could extend beyond the browser ecosystem. The image format is supported by more than a dozen graphic design tools along with productivity applications such as LibreOffice.
Security
Deci roars into action, releasing hyper-efficient AI models for text and image generation
Deci’s entire mission is achieving new standards of efficiency and speed for generative AI inferences — the actual user-facing models — noting that DeciDiffusion is three times faster than direct competitor model Stable Diffusion 1.5, while DeciLM 6B is 15 times faster than Meta’s LLaMA 2 7B.
Automation & Productivity
NeuroBlade and Meta’s Velox team up to boost data analytics acceleration 
Velox is an open-source unified execution engine that consolidates various software-based optimizations from the query engine ecosystem into a singular high-performance library. Designed for seamless integration with various query engines, such as Presto and Apache Spark, Velox provides a robust foundation. But there are issues, since conventional central processing units can struggle to manage analytical queries surpassing 2 gigabits to 3 gigabits per second efficiently because of limitations in data retrieval and query complexity.
Data & Analytics
Amazon launches generative AI tool for sellers to create product listing information 
For sellers, the process is very straightforward. They provide a brief description or a few keywords of the product in question, and Amazon’s AI will do the rest, whipping up a detailed description for the seller to review. Assuming they are satisfied with it, they can add the content to their listing. Alternatively, they can edit the AI generated content to their liking.
Artificial Intelligence
Meet Phi-1.5, the new language model that could make training AI radically cheaper and faster
By generating curated, high quality, synthetic data using existing LLMs (in this case, OpenAI’s ChatGPT) and training a new model on this, the researchers are able to achieve results comparable to leading LLMs at a fraction of the cost and training time.
Artificial Intelligence
EY launches AI platform and LLM after $1.4 billion investment
Today professional services leader EY announced the launch of EY.ai, a comprehensive platform to help clients boost AI adoption. The platform brings together an AI ecosystem with a range of capabilities, with alliances with companies including Microsoft (which provided EY with early access to Azure OpenAI capabilities, such as GPT-3 and GPT-4), Dell Technologies, IBM, SAP, ServiceNow, Thomson Reuters and UiPath.
Artificial Intelligence
JetBrains now offers a dedicated integrated development environment for Rust 
RustRover has been designed to address issues with Rust by simplifying the coding experience to allow developers to unlock the language’s full potential. Through an array of features tailored specifically to Rust, RustRover enables programmers to concentrate on their strengths and alleviate the complexities associated with the language.
DevOps
MGM cyberattack claimed by ALPHV/BlackCat ransom gang
New information has surfaced claiming the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group is responsible for Monday’s debilitating cyberattack on MGM Resorts International. With rumors about a large ransom payment swirling, some insiders say the Las Vegas-based firm may not even be able to pay its employees come Friday.
Security
Stability AI debuts Stable Audio bringing text to audio generation to the masses
Stability AI today announced the initial public release of its Stable Audio technology, providing anyone with ability to use simple text prompts to generate short audio clips. Stability AI is best known as the organization behind the Stable Diffusion text-to-image generation AI technology.
Automation & Productivity
CTERA launches Vault WORM for better data compliance
Vault is designed to provide the flexibility and granularity to create WORM Cloud Folders with customised retention modes for specific periods of time to fit organisations’ specific regulatory or compliance requirements. The CTERA Portal provides centralised control and management of the policies that are enforced at every remote CTERA Edge Filer.
Data Storage
Israeli security governance platform startup Zenity raises $16.5M 
Zenity argues that though low-code/no-code solutions allow organizations to build tools and services to streamline work and automate repetitive tasks, those features come with risks. Less technical users are more prone to creating apps and automation susceptible to data leaks, implicit sharing and identity misuse, it says
Security
Apple’s ‘Wonderlust’ event reveals iPhone 15, Apple Watch 9 and new A17 Pro silicon 
Alongside the new chip and the “prosumer” phones, the company also announced at its “Wanderlust” press event today the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus, which will be powered by the A16 chip, as well as the next generation of Apple Watches, the Series 9, and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 with larger more rugged displays.
Automation & Productivity
CertifID raises $20 million in funding to protect real estate industry from fraud
Every month, CertifID plays a crucial role in safeguarding billions of dollars from fraud by providing advanced software, insurance, and proven recovery services. The platform is widely utilized by various stakeholders, including title companies, law firms, lenders, real estate professionals, as well as home buyers and sellers. Additionally, CertifID provides an extra layer of security by offering up to $1 million in direct coverage for every wire transaction it protects, ensuring peace of mind for its users.
Privacy & Security
YugabyteDB 2.19: Bridging an Application’s Journey from Lift-and-Shift Migration to Massive Scale
YugabyteDB 2.19 enables midsize applications running on single-node database instances to seamlessly move to a fully distributed database environment. The new co-located tables in YugabyteDB help ensure performance comparable to single-node PostgreSQL for midsize applications. And as the app grows, YugabyteDB seamlessly shifts to a fully-distributed mode to provide the massive scaling benefits of distributed SQL.
Data & Analytics
New Skybox Security release includes enhanced attack path analysis 
Key features of the news release include a new Attack Surface Map that delivers new ways to visualize, navigate and interact with the attack surface map. Skybox Security customers can now filter and highlight specific segments of their infrastructure, with assets grouped manually or automatically for enhanced comprehensibility. An improved search feature delivers rapid asset location and navigation.
Security
Anodot Launches AI-Powered CostGPT for Enhanced Cloud Cost Analysis
When managing cloud costs, automation is key to saving time and resources. CostGPT empowers cloud users to address common cost challenges, including complex pricing models, hidden costs, and inadequate cost monitoring and reporting, with a simple search.
Cloud
Intel debuts high-speed Thunderbolt 5 standard with signal modulation upgrade 
When needed, Thunderbolt 5 can further increase throughput to 120 gigabits per second using a technology called Bandwidth Boost. Intel developed Bandwidth Boost partly to ease the task of connecting external displays to a PC. Certain monitors, particularly those that offer a high resolution and refresh rate, have significant bandwidth requirements that couldn’t be met as effectively before.
Automation & Productivity
With ‘GitHub for data,’ Gable.ai wants to connect software engineers and ML developers
It calls its offering the first data collaboration platform that allows software and data/ML developers to iteratively, build and manage high-quality data assets, but investors have taken to calling it “GitHub for data” — one that other data companies like Kaggle and Hex are investing in.
DevOps
Cisco extends business risk observability to cloud-native applications
“I believe the buyer is less concerned, the user who owns the operation is going to use those tools [like Cisco Secure Application],” he added. “I see more of this is being used for the DevSecOps, the ITOps people that want to make sure that I have visibility out to applications in the business.”
Risk Management
SQream Secures $45M in Series C Funding Led to Supercharge AI/ML Enterprise Capabilities
SQream’s benchmarks consistently return improvements in expanding data capacity while reducing ingestion times by 90%, preparation times by 90%, footprint by 90%, and costs by 80%, all while using familiar SQL processes combined with the power of data parallelism.
Data Management
SAS ups AI features in its analytics and CRM platforms
The new capabilities in Viya that are being previewed this week at the company’s Explore conference create lightweight environments for rapid AI model building, support multiple programming languages and run in a scalable cloud computing environment.
Artificial Intelligence
Enfabrica raises $125M to scale up GPUs, memory, networks and storage for distributed AI workloads 
The company is the creator of an Accelerated Compute Fabric device, which is a server fabric chip that it says will provide unmatched scalability, performance and total cost of ownership for distributed AI, extended reality, high-performance computing and in-memory database infrastructure.
Artificial Intelligence
Teradata Launches ask.ai, Brings Generative AI Capabilities to VantageCloud Lake
By reducing the need for complex coding and querying, ask.ai can dramatically increase productivity, speed and efficiency for technical users and expands analytic use to non-technical roles, who can now also use Teradata’s powerful, cloud-native platform to sift through mountains of data and draw insights.
Data & Analytics
New Gigamon release address blind spots in encrypted traffic
The release includes the debut of Gigamon Precyption, a new feature that the company says will enable information technology and security organizations to gain unobscured visibility into encrypted traffic across virtual machine or container workloads. With the new visibility, it adds, users can efficiently conduct advanced threat detection, investigation and response across hybrid cloud infrastructures.
Security
Machine learning chipmaker SiMa.ai enables low-code AI model development at the edge 
The startup offers a platform known as the SiMa.ai Palette, which provides a set of scalable tools for developing machine learning models with high performance and push-button operation. Its GStreamer workflows use advanced scripting and automation on optimized neural network models, and provide pre- and post-processing functions and pipelines that permit the deployment of applications to large numbers of edge devices simultaneously.
Artificial Intelligence
Phronesis Launches World’s First L1 Blockchain Leveraging AI and the Sophia Protocol
Phronesis aims to reshape the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) and Web3 sectors by harnessing Artificial Intelligence and proprietary consensus technology. Phronesis’ utility can be extended to real-world application solutions in various sectors such as supply chain, gaming, finance, energy, and more.
Blockchain
Labelbox Introduces LLM Solution to Help Enterprises Innovate with Generative AI, Expands Partnership with Google Cloud
Labelbox provides a comprehensive suite of tools to perform techniques such as reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), reinforcement learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF), evaluation and red teaming
Artificial Intelligence
Apple’s Lightning connector was the first great port — and USB-C might be the last
This week, 11 years to the day after that launch event, it appears virtually certain that Apple is going to remove the Lightning connector from the iPhone. A new law in the European Union mandates that all phones sold in its member countries must use USB-C for physical charging, and Apple has acknowledged it will have to follow the rules.
Automation & Productivity
Salesforce introduces new AI assistant, Einstein Copilot, for all its CRM apps
Specifically, Einstein Copilot Studio “will also provide configurability to make Einstein Copilot available for use across other consumer-facing channels like websites to power real-time chat, Slack, WhatsApp, or SMS,”
Automation & Productivity
Open19 shakes up identity, leadership to address data center sustainability challenges
While the organization’s name is changing and its scope is expanding, the team remains committed to the Open19 project and will continue rolling out and encouraging adoption of its new v2 specification. The project’s v1 spec is currently used “across the world,” including in Equinix’s digital services portfolio.
Sustainability
Digital forensics and incident response solutions startup Binalyze raises $19M 
The Binalyze IREC Engine collects digital forensic evidence from any endpoint in a network, with the company’s AIR management console able to collect 350 different types of evidence in under 10 minutes. The compromise assessment generated allows users to find the relevant events in the gathered digital evidence more quickly and with fewer resources using DRONE, a rapid assisted compromise assessment module.
Security
MGM ‘cybersecurity issue’ shuts down slot machines and ATMs in Las Vegas casinos
MGM replaced its homepage with a message apologizing for the site’s outage and providing a list of concierge phone numbers at several locations, like the Aria, The Cosmopolitan, Mandalay Bay, Bellagio, New York-New York, and Vdara.
Security
MLPerf 3.1 adds large language model benchmarks for inference
MLCommons is a vendor neutral, multi-stakeholder organization that aims to provide a level playing field for vendors to report on different aspects of AI performance with the MLPerf set of benchmarks. The new MLPerf Inference 3.1 benchmarks released today are the second major update of the results this year, following the 3.0 results that came out in April
Artificial Intelligence
Journalist details stolen in hack of old AP Stylebook website
The Associated Press Corp. is warning that users of the AP Stylebook may have been targeted in a phishing campaign following a data breach involving the theft of data from an old AP Stylebook website maintained by Stylebooks.com.
Privacy & Security
Meta Platforms reportedly building open-source generative AI system to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT 
Ultimately, Meta wants to accelerate the development of the next generation of generative AI models capable of generating more humanlike expressions. Zuckerberg is determined to assert Meta as a major force in the AI industry, having seen his company’s role in its development overshadowed by the achievements of OpenAI with ChatGPT, as well as Google LLC with its Bard chatbot, and even some notable AI startups such as Cohere Inc. and Anthropic.
ChatGPT
McKinsey partners with Salesforce to offer speedy AI adoption plans for enterprises
The collaboration is designed to merge Salesforce’s popular customer relationship management (CRM) software, including its intelligent Einstein applications and Data Cloud, with McKinsey’s specialized AI and data models.
Automation & Productivity
Starburst Introduces Python DataFrame Support for Complex Data Transformation and Data Application Workloads
For Starburst and Trino developers and data engineers, this announcement means that they no longer need to offload data to frameworks like PySpark and Snowpark to handle complex transformation workloads. Instead, teams can leverage a single, powerful MPP engine for both their analytical and transformation workloads – reducing the cost and complexity of their stack.
Data Management
Google makes Privacy Sandbox generally available in Chrome 
Privacy Sandbox likewise enables brands to determine consumers’ areas of interest. However, the technology does so without providing access to users’ browsing histories as third-party cookies do. According to Google, the result is improved consumer privacy.
Data Privacy
CISA Warning: Nation-State Hackers Exploit Fortinet and Zoho Vulnerabilities
"Nation-state advanced persistent threat (APT) actors exploited CVE-2022-47966 to gain unauthorized access to a public-facing application (Zoho ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus), establish persistence, and move laterally through the network,"
Security
Multinational Op Takes Down a Cybercriminal Botnet Infrastructure
The FBI gained legal access to the Qakbot infrastructure and then directed its traffic to servers controlled by the FBI. These servers instructed infected computers to download an uninstaller file, which severed their connection to the botnet and prevented further malware installation. The FBI found more than 700,000 computers around the world infected with Qakbot, according to the report.
Security
How note-taking AI from Google and Apple complete you
Silicon Valley’s tech giants intend to mainstream AI-powered note-taking and journaling. This could open up a whole new connection between the data we collect and the lives we lead.
Automation & Productivity
AI startup Imbue closes $200M funding round backed by Nvidia 
Imbue says it’s developing large language models “tailor-made for reasoning.” As the company detailed: “Robust reasoning is necessary for effective action. It involves the ability to deal with uncertainty, to know when to change our approach, to ask questions and gather new information, to play out scenarios and make decisions, to make and discard hypotheses, and generally to deal with the complicated, hard-to-predict nature of the real world.”
Artificial Intelligence
Netskope enhances SASE digital experience monitoring with acquisition
“Kadiska’s approach of leveraging real user-experience monitoring (RUM) with end-to-end network and application performance visibility from user devices to hybrid, SaaS [software-as-a-service] and cloud applications has proven to be a game changer for enterprises around the globe,”
Network Management
Apple Rushes to Patch Zero-Day Flaws Exploited for Pegasus Spyware on iPhones
"The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim," the interdisciplinary laboratory said. "The exploit involved PassKit attachments containing malicious images sent from an attacker iMessage account to the victim."
Security
Making a sales call? Otter.ai wants to listen, summarize, and help
This week, the 7-year-old company debuted OtterPilot for Sales, an AI assistant that automatically listens to sales calls, auto-transcribes the conversation and keeps track of each speaker, and analyzes key decision-making factors such as Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline (commonly known as BANT), displaying these in a helpful sidebar called “Sales Insights.”
Automation & Productivity
SAP acquires LeanIX to focus on AI-assisted IT modernization
ERP leader SAP today announced the decision to acquire LeanIX, a German startup that provides enterprises with a clear picture of their entire software usage, covering everything from what they’ve bought, licensed, and built, to what they plan to add in the future.
IT Management
Tencent debuts Hunyuan AI model, opens it up for enterprise use Chinese internet giant Huny
Hunyuan has more than 100 billion parameters and was trained with more than 2 trillion tokens, while OpenAI's GPT-3 AI model, backed by Microsoft, contained 175 billion parameters when it was released in 2020 and Meta's Llama-2 model had 70 billion parameters when it was released this year.
Artificial Intelligence
Microsoft suspects China is now using AI in disinformation campaigns to sway US voters 
The report’s focus was on possible threats from all of East Asia, but China is the country to watch out for in the realm of disinformation threats. The analysts said that the Chinese Communist Party now has “a new capability to automatically generate images it can use for influence operations” that mimic U.S. voters from left to right to create controversy in regard to racial, economic and ideological matters.
AI Ethics
Anthropic announces Claude Pro, a paid subscription for its generative AI chatbot 
Claude Pro is the first paid plan for Anthropic’s Claude 2 chatbot service, and it’s being made available to users in the U.S. and U.K. first of all. According to the startup, customers will benefit from longer conversations, the ability to send “many more messages,” priority access during periods of high traffic, and first access to new features and updates.
Automation & Productivity
Two Engineers Bring Class Action Lawsuit Against OpenAI, Microsoft
Specifically, it claims OpenAI used personal data from social media, stealing their “skills and expertise” in order to make products that could “someday result in [their] professional obsolescence.”
Artificial Intelligence
HubSpot announces a range of new AI sales and marketing tools geared toward SMBs
ChatSpot: which uses OpenAI’s hit large language model (LLM) application ChatGPT and combines it with data from a Hubspot user’s Smart CRM to answer all the questions a user might have about their clients or business prospects, such as their funding. It can even help craft and edit marketing content and messages. It’s available in public beta and has already recorded 80,000 total users.
Marketing Tech
EU Big Tech Clampdown Probe Bites Apple, Microsoft
The EU on Wednesday named 22 services from six companies (mostly American), including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. Companies on the list have six months to comply with the new tough standards or challenge them in court. The European Commission (the EU’s executive arm) will investigate whether Microsoft’s Bing, Edge, and Advertising services, along with Apple’s iMessage can be exempt from the regulations.
Data Privacy
Microsoft reveals hackers compromised engineer account to gain access to government accounts 
Exactly how the consumer key was obtained is what makes the story interesting. Microsoft’s investigation found that a consumer signing system crash in April of 2021 resulted in a snapshot of the crashed process. The crash dumps are not meant to include the signing key, but in this case, a “race condition” allowed the key to be present in the crash dump.
Security
Alert: Apache SuperSet Vulnerabilities Expose Servers to Remote Code Execution Attacks
Outside of these weaknesses, the latest version of Superset also remediates a separate improper REST API permission issue (CVE-2023-36388) that allows for low-privilege users to carry out server-side request forgery (SSRF) attacks.
Security
Nasuni working with Presidio to manage AWS costs
Nasuni says it’s optimizing AWS cloud use and reducing opex with Presidio’s Proactive Recapture into Savings Management (PRISM) program. It’s said to use an AI/ML engine to save customers from overpaying for cloud instances. Presidio – a US-based consulting, service, and IT systems supplier – says it will “assume all of the overpayment risk of buying, selling, operationalizing and day-to-day managing of RIs (Reserved Instances).”
Cloud
You can now make an AI clone of yourself — or anyone else, living or dead — with Delphi
Simply upload as few as four documents containing your communications to it — and as many as thousands, including emails, chat transcripts, even YouTube videos or audio files such as podcasts or voicemails — and Delphi will create an AI chatbot that mimics, as closely as it can, your personality, manner of writing, or speaking, audibly, as of today, through a partnership with voice-cloning startup ElevenLabs.
Artificial Intelligence
Upbound Spaces brings managed control planes to self-hosted computing environments 
Upbound said Spaces is a version of Crossplane that will appeal to businesses with specific, self-managed needs, such as air-gapped servers and their own cloud environments. It enables customers to run control planes where they want while adhering to their unique requirements around data security, regulatory compliance and operational control. Businesses can now deploy fully managed control planes in any cloud or on-premises environment and receive the same benefits as if they were using the standard Upbound managed service
IT Management
Meet Intuit Assist, a new AI assistant that can do more than just answer questions
Intuit Assist is the result of years of research and development by Intuit’s engineering and data science teams. It’s the most visible and tangible example of Intuit’s accelerated push to provide value to its 100 million small business and consumer customers from its extensive experimentation with Generative AI over the past two years.
Automation & Productivity
Slack’s AI tool that can recap channels and threads starts testing this winter
One of the features that Slack AI will offer is channel recaps, which can automatically generate summaries of messages sent on a particular channel. This could likely help you sift through unrelated chatter and catch up on important conversations you might’ve missed. The tool will be able to summarize threads, too.
Automation & Productivity
IBM Expands Cloud Security and Compliance Center for Protection Across Hybrid, Multicloud Environments
Research from IBM revealed that more than 77 percent of global business leaders have adopted a hybrid cloud approach, yet more than half of respondents are still concerned about security, and believe compliance in the cloud is too difficult to maintain. To help clients overcome these challenges, the next evolution of the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center aims to help clients continuously monitor and manage their security and compliance from a central dashboard across their hybrid and public cloud environments – not just IBM Cloud.
Cloud
Story Protocol launches with $54M to build blockchain-based IP ownership network 
It will do so by providing tracking, licensing and revenue sharing for creators across all forms of media including prose, images, gaming video and audio. “In a world of total abundance catalyzed by generative AI, blockchain technology presents the perfect solution for transparent provenance tracking and fair attribution,”
Blockchain
d-Matrix Announces $110M in Series B Funding to Make Generative AI Commercially Viable with First-of-Its-Kind Inference Compute Platform
d-Matrix’s recent silicon announcement, Jayhawk II, is the latest example of how the company is working to fundamentally change the physics of memory-bound compute workloads common in generative AI and large language model (LLM) applications
Automation & Productivity
Infinidat data protection box bumps up restore speed with Veeam
Herzog claimed a 20 PB Veeam backup set was recovered in 11 minutes and 55 seconds from an Infinidat InfiniSafe system. Spreadsheet maths says this is 1.678 PB per minute and that means 27.96 TBps. At least in this single test, if the reported numbers are accurate, this is much faster than a Pure Storage FlashBlade, with stated restore times of up to 270 TB per hour (4.5 TB per minute and thus 75 GBps.
Data Management
Time-series database startup InfluxData debuts self-managed version of InfluxDB 
InfluxData said InfluxDB Clustered is the next evolution of the InfluxDB Enterprise platform, aimed at private clouds and on-premises environments. Customers gain all of the capabilities of the standard InfluxDB platform, with the added advantage that it comes packaged and configured for their unique hosting environments and data storage requirements
Data Management
Gleen AI arrives with $4.9M in funding to stop AI hallucinations using enterprises’ own data
While these inaccurate responses can be at times humorous or interesting, for businesses trying to rely on them to produce accurate data for employees or users, the results can be hugely risky — especially for highly-regulated, life-and-death information in healthcare, medicine, heavy industry, and others.
Artificial Intelligence
Israeli cloud security company Upwind raises $50M 
The company’s service protects Kubernetes and container-based services with real-time network and operating system-level data using eBPF DeamonSets and Kubernetes audit logs to detect threats within containers. Upwind’s platform offers continuous visibility into how cloud infrastructure and workloads behave in Runtime to find the most critical threats and risks and to prevent them with context and automation.
Security
Zoom launches AI Companion to summarize meetings for late attendees
Zoom plans to expand AI Companion’s capabilities in the future. Users will be able to interact with the assistant through natural language queries and receive help with various tasks, such as meeting preparation, summarizing chat messages, consolidating meeting summaries, composing emails and finding relevant documents.
Automation & Productivity
Ushur Launches AI Studio to Democratize AI Model Training and Management for Its Customer Experience Automation Platform
"AI Studio combines the rich visual interface of our process automation FlowBuilder with AI model management capabilities to deliver a truly democratizing experience for the citizen developer. Focusing specifically on training and deploying classification models in this release, we aim to deliver significant efficiencies in time to value and AI ops.”
Automation & Productivity
Quantum improves private-public cloud data integration
The data management supplier has added facilities to its DXi backup appliance, FlexSync replication, and ActiveScale object store to move unstructured data to and from public and private clouds for tiering, retention, and integrated public-private cloud workflows.
Data Management
Hackers Target High-Privileged Okta Accounts via Help Desk
"Threat actors appeared to either have a) passwords to privileged user accounts or b) be able to manipulate the delegated authentication flow via Active Directory (AD) prior to calling the IT service desk at a targeted org, requesting a reset of all MFA factors in the target account,"
Security
Cerabyte roadmaps ceramic nano-memory storage
The technology roadmap is projected to scale from 100 nm to 3 nm bit sizes, corresponding to areal densities of GB/cm2 to TB/cm2 class. Data reading is achieved with high-resolution microscopic imaging techniques for optical read, or electron beam microscopy for structures below the optic diffraction limit.
Data Storage
Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) to launch video & audio calling feature to take on WhatsApp
In a post on X on Thursday, Musk said that users will not need a phone number to use the new features that will be made available on Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and personal computers, eliminating the necessity for users to possess a traditional phone number.
Automation & Productivity
How many jobs are available in technology in the US?
The latest BLS report, however, found that employers across the US economy reduced tech occupations by an estimated 189,000 positions, pushing the unemployment rate for tech jobs up to 2.1% — almost where it was in June, CompTIA said.
Tech Jobs
D3, a next-generation domain name company, raises $5M to create new Web3 TLDs that are interoperable with Web2 DNS domains
This is a game-changer as users will now be able to register and trade DNS domains with native Web2 and Web3 functionality without the need for SDKs, APIs, or other user hacks. In addition, D3’s patent-pending technology also provides users seamless domain compatibility across various browsers, email services, and wallets, ensuring a smooth and trouble-free experience.
Web3
Android is getting new features to keep people productive and connected 
The Android team is also putting AI to even more use for blind and low-vision users with images in group chat, photos on the camera app and social media using Image Q&A on Lookout. Lookout was launched in 2019 and designed for users with vision impairments and uses AI to help them accomplish everyday tasks such as sorting mail or putting away groceries.
Automation & Productivity
StorPool and Proxmox Elevate Virtual Environments with Seamless Storage Integration
This allows IT teams using Proxmox VE to leverage a best-in-class block-storage data platform, running on standard servers available as a fully managed storage-as-a-service (STaaS) bundle. So now, any company utilizing Proxmox can achieve end-to-end automation allowing its IT teams to focus on strategic projects rather than managing individual components.
Data Storage
MetaQuiz Sparks Growing Interest with Endless Library of AI-Generated Questions
MetaQuiz leverages AI to deliver dynamic, accurate content, enriching the learning process. Every question comes with an explanation text prior to taking the quiz, deepening the user’s grasp of the subject matter. The use of blockchain technology provides immutable transparency and credibility ensuring that all draws are tamper-proof and verifiable.
EdTech
Integral Secures $6.9M Seed Round led by Haystack to Maximize Data Privacy and Quality
Personal and highly revealing healthcare data such as medical records, health histories, and genetic information, when combined with non-healthcare data such as social media activity, purchasing history, and location data, give researchers a deep, holistic understanding of a person’s health and lifestyle. While this combined data set enhances healthcare research and improves health outcomes, it can pose a significant threat to people’s privacy by potentially exposing sensitive information about individuals.
Data Privacy
VMware warns customers to immediately patch critical Aria network software holes
VMware Aria is the vendor’s multi-cloud management platform that integrates previously separate VMware services such as vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, vRealize Network Insight, and CloudHealth.
Security
Pirros, a startup that applies AI to streamline drawing sets for buildings and infrastructure, lands $2 million seed round
With Pirros, architects and engineers can spend more time actually designing buildings instead of documenting them. This is achieved by automatic information aggregation and storage, so that all of a company’s outputs are stored and managed in a centralized, searchable platform for easy future re-use.
Automation & Productivity
KryptoGO Launches AI-Powered One-Stop Web3 Cloud Solution
With KG Studio, KryptoGO aims to provide the customer journey and user experience required for entry into the Web3 market. The enterprise-level application offers rapid, secure multi-chain wallets, compliance technology, encrypted financial management, innovative NFT marketing tools, user management, and intelligent analytics. All these features aim to empower businesses to succeed in the era of Web3+AI.
Web3
Ellie.ai €2.5M to help professionals make the most out of their data 
Product and data teams can use Ellie.ai’s software to model complex data models and structures to better understand information relationships, such as database models that are needed for running business applications. Its software uses visual modeling to help teams collaborate together to produce high-quality relational and consistent structural models that can be implemented quickly as business logic blueprints.
Data & Analytics
Google tackles multicloud connectivity with Cross-Cloud Network
“With Cross-Cloud Network we will now be able to provide you — on demand — any-to-any connectivity where you can actually connect AWS, Azure and others directly into Google Cloud without having to invest in physical infrastructure and manage that life cycle of the infrastructure,"
Cloud
Microsoft to discontinue the default WordPad word processor in Windows 
It appears that Microsoft plans to substitute WordPad partly with Notepad, the simpler text editing application included in Windows. Notepad was released in 1983, a full 12 years before WordPad. The initial version of the tool launched not for Windows but rather MS-DOS, Microsoft’s first operating system.
Automation & Productivity
OpenAI rival AI21 Labs raises $155M in funding
Its apps are based on what AI21 Labs says is the world’s most customizable and sophisticated LLM, Jurassic-2. It can be used by companies to build advanced, chat-based AI apps capable of performing many tasks at scale. Notably, Jurassic-2 powers the startup’s AI21 Studio, which is a developer platform for building custom, text-based applications; Wordtune, a multilingual reading and writing AI assistant; and Wordtune Read, which is used to analyze long documents in seconds and create a simplified summary.
Automation & Productivity
Sprig uses AI to transform product surveys into conversational data
A new feature Sprig calls AI Analysis for Surveys, which, as the name suggests, uses generative AI large language models (LLMs) to intelligently comb through survey data and provide instantaneous insights to the company that conducted the survey.
Automation & Productivity
Hyperproof reels in $40M for its regulatory compliance platform
Alongside high-level metrics, Hyperproof aggregates information about specific regulatory compliance issues in a company’s infrastructure. Compliance teams can use the platform to identify internal technology assets that don’t meet cybersecurity or privacy requirements. According to Hyperproof, its platform can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of suppliers’ compliance efforts.
Data Compliance
Google DeepMind unveils tool to watermark and detect AI-generated images 
In an announcement published Tuesday, DeepMind researchers unveiled SynthID, a beta tool that embeds a digital “watermark” directly into an AI-generated image produced by Google’s Imagen generative AI model in Vertex AI, the company’s platform for building AI. This way a limited number of users testing out the new tool can mark their images as AI-generated
Artificial Intelligence
Gong’s new Call Spotlight uses AI to summarize customer calls for revenue teams
The new AI-driven tool (powered by a mix of proprietary Gong AI models and GPT-4 in Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service) automatically transcribes and analyzes a revenue team member’s conversation with a customer over video call, audio call, mobile or desktop, even emails and text correspondence — any communications the revenue team member wants — and auto-generates a summary and key points for the revenue team to act on.
Automation & Productivity
VMware warns customers to immediately patch critical Aria network software holes
VMware Aria is the vendor’s multi-cloud management platform that integrates previously separate VMware services such as vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, vRealize Network Insight, and CloudHealth. A single Aria Hub console provides centralized views and controls and lets customers see and manage the entire multi-cloud environment.
Security
In what could be a landmark case, Open AI lawyers motion to dismiss authors’ copyright claims 
These include vicarious copyright infringement — indirectly benefiting from copyright infringement — as well as violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unfair competition, negligence and unjust enrichment. If the company succeeds, the cases will go ahead only on the claim of direct copyright infringement.
Artificial Intelligence
Typeface teams with GrowthLoop and Google Cloud to launch unified ‘GenAI Marketing Solution’
The offering allows teams to produce personalized content — from blogs to social media posts — for their campaigns, leveraging data from Google BigQuery, audience segmentation from GrowthLoop and Typeface’s generative AI smarts. According to the companies, it can cut the time taken to build and launch creative campaigns from several weeks down to days or even a few hours.
Automation & Productivity
Arize AI wants to improve enterprise LLMs with ‘Prompt Playground,’ new data analysis tools
But once an organization identifies a large language model (LLM) or several it wishes to use, the hard work is far from over. In fact, deploying the LLM in a way that benefits an organization requires understanding the best prompts employees or customers can use to generate helpful results — otherwise it’s pretty much worthless — as well as what data to include in those prompts from the organization or user.
Data & Analytics
Typeface teams with GrowthLoop and Google Cloud to launch unified ‘GenAI Marketing Solution’
The offering allows teams to produce personalized content — from blogs to social media posts — for their campaigns, leveraging data from Google BigQuery, audience segmentation from GrowthLoop and Typeface’s generative AI smarts. According to the companies, it can cut the time taken to build and launch creative campaigns from several weeks down to days or even a few hours.
Automation & Productivity
Dell Technologies and Denvr Dataworks to Unleash Generative AI Innovation
The solution can train large language models by managing GenAI datasets that contain hundreds of billions of parameters. With preconfigured tools and templates, organizations can speed the development and deployment of large language models.
Artificial Intelligence
Google Cloud and Virtusa Aim to Train Engineers and Push AI
Taking action as other tech companies team-up on AI, the companies will jointly develop a global Generative AI Center of Excellence to collaborate on training and research for the development of solutions meant to support AI adoption by enterprises. Part of the plan includes an investment to help train more than 2,000 engineers to make use of Google Cloud’s AI tech.
Training & Certs
LTIMindtree Collaborates with CAST AI to Help Businesses Optimize Their Cloud Investments
This combined offering will empower organizations to optimize Kubernetes management and costs in a single or multi-cloud environments, without any manual intervention. It will also help free up the customers’ time from routine tasks by automating 100% of their cloud-native infrastructure, resulting in increased stability and reduced costs.
Cloud
Deepfake scams have arrived: Fake videos spread on Facebook, TikTok and Youtube
Last week, NBC News viewed more than 50 videos posted to those sites that featured computer-manipulated images and audio of well-known people, all of which appeared to have been created to scam viewers out of money.
Privacy & Security
Checkmarx warns of unknown threat actor targeting developers through NPM packages 
Each of the malicious packages used by the threat actor was designed to execute automatically upon installation. Each NPM package contained three files — package.json, preinstall.js, and index.js — that were used as part of the attack process.
Security
Context raises $3.5M to elevate LLM apps with detailed analytics
Today, Context is a full-fledged product analytics platform for LLM-powered applications. The offering provides high-level insights detailing how users are engaging with an app and how the product is performing in return.
Data & Analytics
Confirm raises $6.2 million to bring generative AI and network analysis to performance reviews
Confirm’s approach measures employee performance by examining how all employees in the company view one another. ONA operates on the principle that performance isn’t an isolated metric, but a network of relationships and influences within the workplace.
HR Tech
Google's Cross-Cloud Network service aims to simplify multicloud networking
“We know that 70-plus percent of our enterprises are going to adopt multicloud. [The] idea behind Cross-Cloud Network is that today many organizations operate bespoke networks with turnkey security to connect to those clouds that are operationally complex to manage and build, thereby resulting in a much higher total cost of ownership and soaring costs,"
Cloud
Striim Unveils Cloud Mission Critical with Advanced Multi-Node Data Streaming on Google Cloud
This groundbreaking solution not only underscores Striim’s dedication to pushing technological boundaries but also equips enterprises with the capabilities for real-time replication of disparate enterprise data to Google Cloud’s BigQuery, Spanner, Pub/Sub, and Cloud SQL.
Data & Analytics
Multinational task force takes down prolific Qakbot malware and botnet operation 
The joint operation, which spanned the U.S., France, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Latvia and the U.K., saw law enforcement gain access to the Qakbot botnet on Aug. 25. Upon gaining access to Qakbot, botnet traffic was redirected to and through servers controlled by law enforcement. Qakbot-infected computers were instructed to download a Qakbot Uninstall file that uninstalled Qakbot malware from the infected computer.
Security
Couchbase jumps on the generative AI bandwagon with Capella iQ code generator 
Couchbase Capella is a cloud-hosted version of the Couchbase NoSQL database that is used to power complex business applications. Unlike traditional databases, such as Oracle Database, Capella can process both structured and unstructured data at the same time, making it a more flexible choice for certain kinds of apps. The ability to handle multiple kinds of data means Capella can serve as a data cache.
Data & Analytics
iManage Announces iManage AI, a Powerful New AI Engine to Transform Knowledge Search Across its Platform
The core of the new iManage AI solution is a document classification and enrichment engine that dramatically improves knowledge search and content workflows on the iManage platform. iManage AI builds on models trained on tens of thousands of legal-specific documents to automatically analyze documents and extract key data points, such as Jurisdiction, Parties, or Dates, then save that information with the document.
Automation & Productivity
SAP and Google Cloud Enhance Open Data Cloud With New Generative AI Solutions for Enterprises
By integrating generative AI into SAP and Google Cloud’s open data cloud, customers can deploy powerful new solutions that use information from SAP Datasphere and from virtually any other data source to significantly improve business insights, analysis, and decision-making.
Cloud
Cisco partnership with Nutanix raises questions over HyperFlex
The Cisco-Nutanix offering integrates Cisco’s SaaS-managed UCS compute, networking, and Intersight management with the Nutanix Cloud Platform suite: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Nutanix Cloud Manager, Nutanix Unified Storage, and Nutanix Desktop Services. It will support UCS rack and blade servers, including initial support for C-Series Servers and planned, future support for UCS X-Series.
Cloud
CompTIA to offer advanced cloud networking certification
“Beyond validating technical skills, IT pros who earn a CompTIA Xpert Series certification will have demonstrated their ability to understand, implement, and articulate advanced technology solutions in any business environment.”
Training & Certs
Mandiant warns hackers are still targeting Barracuda Email Security Gateway devices 
“If you have not replaced your appliance after receiving notice in your UI, contact support now,” the company wrote in an advisory. “Barracuda’s remediation recommendation at this time is full replacement of the impacted ESG.”
Security
Rockset Raises $44 Million in Funding to Power Search, Analytics, and AI Applications
Rockset ingests streaming data and uses a highly efficient Converged Index storage format, stored on RocksDB, to deliver low latency search, filtering, aggregations and joins, simply using SQL. . By extending the company’s search and analytics capabilities into vector search, Rockset now enables developers to index and update both metadata and vector embeddings in real time, a vital component to implementing semantic search, recommendation engines and Generative AI applications.
Data & Analytics
Google brings new AI to AlloyDB and database migration service
Among the AI focused database announcements is the introduction of AlloyDB AI, which brings vector embeddings to the PostgreSQL compatible cloud database. The new vector embeddings will also be part of the AlloyDB Omni service which is entering public preview today, enabling users to run AlloyDB outside of the Google Cloud.
Data & Analytics
UserTesting expands platform with generative AI to scale human insights
“UserTesting AI is a set of capabilities that are designed to be easily understood by our customers as being AI powered, that help a research, design, marketing or product team, essentially achieve more throughput,"
Automation & Productivity
Google’s Duet AI is now available in Gmail, Docs, and more
Now, you can use Google’s AI to make spreadsheets, whip up slide decks, and summarize all those documents you were never going to actually read.
Automation & Productivity
VMware separates out HCI storage in vSAN Max
The essence of HCI is that compute, storage, and networking are all contained in one chassis with the system scaling up or down by adding or removing hardware. However, that means if you want to additional storage capacity, you have to add more compute as well, and vice versa.
Data Storage
Cisco services help enterprises set infrastructure, operations priorities
"Using telemetry and high-touch discovery, our experts analyze your IT environment and identify strategies to achieve your desired business outcomes," Wildman said. Then Cisco and partners make recommendations, help customers prioritize IT initiatives, and build an execution plan.
IT Management
Google Cloud debuts its most powerful, AI-optimized VMs yet
To meet this need, Google has conceived the Cloud TPU v5e, available now in preview. It’s said to be the most cost-efficient, versatile and scalable cloud TPU it has ever devised, providing integration with GKE, Google’s machine learning framework Vertex AI and various leading AI frameworks, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow and JAX.
Automation & Productivity
With Duet AI and BigQuery Studio, Google Cloud gives analytics teams tools to bring AI to data 
Announced Google’s cloud conference Google Cloud Next 2023, BigQuery Studio, now in preview, provides customers a single interface for data analytics in Google Cloud that allows engineers and developers to work on data without having to switch between tools. It also allows teams to edit SQL, Python, Spark and other languages to run analytics at petabyte scale without additional infrastructure.
Data & Analytics
GSA seeks help to ‘get across the finish line’ modernizing cybersecurity, adopting zero trust 
"They need to be able to help us run our security operations center and incident response centers, be able to do cyber threat intelligence … be able to do cyber threat hunting. And then because we’ve been doing DevSecOps here at GSA for a long time, using agile for a long time, they need to fit seamlessly into that because they’re the ‘Sec’ in DevSecOps.”
Security
Google Cloud launches A3 supercomputer, custom ASICs for AI
Google first introduced its A3 supercomputer powered with Nvidia H100 GPUs in May and today announced A3 VMs will be generally available next month. A3 trains, tunes and serves “incredibly demanding and scalable generative AI workloads and large language models [LLMs]” at three-times the speed and 10-times the networking bandwidth of Google’s previous A2 supercomputer, Lohmeyer claimed.
Cloud
Poe’s new desktop app lets you use all the AI chatbots in one place
Poe, the AI chatbot platform created by Quora, has added a slew of updates, including a Mac app, the ability to have multiple simultaneous conversations with the same AI bot, access to Meta’s Llama 2 model, and more. It’s also planning an enterprise tier so that companies can manage the platform for their employees, according to an email that was recently sent to Poe users.
Automation & Productivity
OpenAI launches ChatGPT Enterprise with bevy of cybersecurity features 
One of the main selling points of ChatGPT Enterprise is that it provides unlimited access to Advanced Data Analysis, a data science tool that OpenAI debuted earlier this month. The tool was originally known as Code Interpreter. It allows users to run mathematical calculations, visualize the results and change the format of files using natural language commands.
Automation & Productivity
SEALSQ Launches the VAULTIC292, a New Cryptographic Module to Secure IoT Devices & Sensors
Designed for cost-effectiveness and seamless integration, VaultIC292 functions as a fortified microcontroller, primed to endow devices with a robust, secure identity. This identity is key for IoT applications such as Smart Home Devices or field sensors. It allows the establishment of a trusted connection to clouds or local networks via the TLS protocol, ensuring impeccable device authentication.
Security
Qase raises $6.7M in funding to boost software testing speed by 60% and become the ‘DataDog of TestOps’
The Austin, Texas-based Qase will use the fresh capital injection to expand its team and launch the first Jira-like marketplace for test management tools designed to boost efficiency for QA teams. With a remarkable 3x year-on-year revenue growth, Qase has processed over 27 million test results for more than 100,000 developers and clients, including notable companies like Wolt, Asana, and SeatGeek.
Automation & Productivity
Yahoo Mail Debuts AI Enhancements for a Smarter Inbox
Unique to Yahoo Mail, Shopping Saver surfaces long-forgotten gift cards, discount codes, and store credits in user inboxes, and drafts suggested messages to vendors to help apply those savings after a purchase has been made. Nearly half of U.S. adults have at least one unused gift card, gift voucher or store credit, and now Yahoo Mail users are able to cash in on their inbox.
Automation & Productivity
DoorDash debuts AI-powered voice ordering service 
The company offers the option to use its AI tool with a service called DoorDash Drive. The latter offering allows restaurants to integrate the food delivery giant’s platform with their websites and apps. When a customer places an order with a restaurant that uses DoorDash Drive, the package is delivered by a DoorDash courier.
Automation & Productivity
Fortinet extends SASE to WLAN for microbranch, IoT and OT security
This extension is particularly beneficial for microbranches like retail stores, ATM centers, small health care clinics and small insurance companies where five to 15 employees typically run operations. “Oftentimes, they don’t have enough staff, especially with the cybersecurity skills shortage, to provide full security.”
Security
Toren AI Launches Commercial Operations Revolutionizing Industries with State-of-the-Art Video Intelligence Solutions
Toren AI’s advanced object recognition and analytics technologies enhance any camera infrastructure to detect health and safety risks, optimize operational processes, and precisely detect security risks or suspicious activities in protected sites.
Security
Multiple news organizations block OpenAI’s GPTBot web crawler 
A separate analysis from startup Originality.ai found that Insider is also filtering requests from OpenAI’s crawler. According to the startup, more than 60 of the world’s 1,000 most visited websites are blocking GPTBot and the list appears to be steadily growing. The crawler has been disallowed by not only news organizations but also tech firms such as Quora Inc. and other companies.
ChatGPT
APERIO Closes $9M in Series A1 Funding to Advance Operational Data Quality
“Their solution directly addresses the data-quality roadblocks faced by manufacturers hoping to unlock the full potential of AI. APERIO’s tools and approach tackle data-quality issues at scale, enabling manufacturers to improve their operational technology data infrastructure and governance."
Data & Analytics
Augmented data analytics platform ConverSight raises $9M in Series A funding 
ConverSight, officially known as ThickStat Inc., is the creator of a no-code and low-code augmented analytics platform that helps organizations to make data-driven decisions. Its generative artificial intelligence-based AI assistant Athena allows business workers to access insights in a conversational way, simply by asking questions of their company’s data.
Data & Analytics
NetApp and Google deepen Cloud Volumes Service collab
It is based on NetApp’s ONTAP operating system and its file-based data functions running on the Google Cloud Platform as a native GCP service. It provides multi-access protocol support for NFS V3 and v4.1, as well as SMB, and has features such as snapshots, clones, replication, and cross-region backup. It is the only Google storage service supporting both NFS and SMB.
Data Storage
Ikigai Labs Announces $25M in Series A Funding to Bring Generative AI for Tabular Data to All Enterprises
Ikigai Labs solves these challenges by pairing its best-in-class time series forecasting with its no-code AI platform built on top of its three proprietary foundation blocks – aiMatch, for data reconciliation, aiCast, for prediction and aiPlan, for scenario planning and optimization – together with expert-in-the-loop (EiTL), an innovative addition for reinforcement learning.
Data & Analytics
Alibaba launches AI models that understand images and have more complex conversations
According to reports, the tech giant said that Qwen-VL was designed to be the advanced evolution of its 7-billion-parameter model, Tongyi Qianwen. This dynamic model showcases a remarkable capability to effortlessly handle both images and text prompts. Its versatility extends from effectively answering wide-ranging questions related to various images to creating captivating captions for those images.
Artificial Intelligence
'Whiffy Recon' Malware Transmits Device Location Every 60 Seconds
Researchers have uncovered the "Whiffy Recon" malware being deployed by the SmokeLoader botnet, which is a customized Wi-Fi scanning executable for Windows systems that tracks the physical locations of victims.
Security
South Korea’s Naver launches HyperClova X, a new generative AI service to compete with ChatGPT
With this launch, Naver now joins the ranks of companies unveiling large language models, directly competing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Naver’s own language model offers a range of services similar to those of ChatGPT. HyperClova X powers an array of new applications including an AI chatbot named CLOVA X, and a generative AI-powered search engine called Cue, which is on par with Microsoft Bing.
ChatGPT
Malware-infected advertising grows ever more sophisticated, and lethal 
With malvertising, the infected ads are typically placed on legitimate ad networks, which makes them more difficult to spot and remove. The technique continues to use more and more sophisticated mechanisms for getting their infections spread throughout the web and keep them running for a long time. The exploits can operate in one of several ways, including intercepting a user’s clickstream on random hyperlinks and substituting them with redirects to advertising websites.
Security
Irreverent Labs, backed by Samsung Next, set to revolutionize video content creation with AI
The young startup, with just about 25 employees today, has been building highly advanced AI models to generate 3D animated videos from simple text prompts. Irreverent Labs said its upcoming “video foundation model” can seamlessly translate prompts into captivating 3D videos with an unprecedented level of quality and control.
Automation & Productivity
dbt Labs Builds Momentum as the Industry Standard for Data Transformation
The dbt Community, which is now 80,000+ members strong, remains an essential industry hub for learning and sharing analytics engineering best practices. As the dbt Community continues to scale, dbt Labs remains committed to fostering an environment for data professionals to work alongside one another and contribute to the growth of the modern data stack.
Data & Analytics
Cisco, Kyndryl step up partnership to cut enterprise security threats
Specifically, Kyndryl will be integrating its own cyber resiliency offering with Cisco’s overarching Security Cloud platform that includes security components such as Cisco’s Duo access control, extended detection and response features, and Multicloud Defense, which orchestrates security and policy across private and public clouds.
Security
Modular nabs $100M for its AI programming language and inference engine 
Modular has developed a programming language called Mojo that it positions as a faster alternative. The language’s syntax is nearly identical to that of Python, which means it’s relatively easy to use. The key difference, according to Modular, is that Mojo is up to 35,000 times faster.
DevOps
Watch out, Midjourney! Ideogram launches AI image generator with impressive typography
Another image generator? Don’t we have enough to choose from between Midjourney, OpenAI’s Dall-E 2, and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion? Well, Ideogram has a major selling point, as it may have finally solved a problem plaguing most other popular AI image generators to date: reliable text generation within the image, such as lettering on signs and for company logos.
Automation & Productivity
Gupshup launches enhanced domain-specific ACE LLM adapted for industry use 
The new domain-specific models, called ACE LLM, enable enterprise users to build applications capable of using internal business knowledge to produce natural language conversational experiences fused with industry specific knowhow. These models provide more precise humanlike responses and have a better speed and scale for answering industry questions while doing knowledge work than other models on the market because they have been tuned for those specific industries.
Automation & Productivity
Korea’s Naver joins generative AI race with HyperCLOVA X large language model
The company said it has opened beta testing for CLOVA X in English and Korean and will make HyperCLOVA X available to enterprise users, allowing them to customize the model on their own data. It also plans to add an AI function called Cue into its search engine, much like what Microsoft has done with Bing, by November 2023.
Artificial Intelligence
Introducing Ask Blue J, the Groundbreaking Generative AI Platform for Tax
Leveraging Blue J’s extensive database of US tax content, coupled with the most advanced large language models and the oversight of an experienced team of legal experts, Ask Blue J generates responsive tax answers, appends primary sources and presents related content, including cases, in seconds.
Automation & Productivity
50TB IBM tape drive more than doubles LTO-9 capacity
The TS1170 drive operates at 400MBps raw throughput and supports both 12gig SAS and 16gig FC connectivity. It is also recognized as LTFS-ready. However, JF media is not backwards-compatible with the earlier JE specification.
Data Storage
CyberLink Launches FaceMe Platform 5.4, a Complete API Solution for Facial Recognition
An on-premise and server based facial recognition API system, supporting various operating systems (Windows, Red Hat, CentOS) and accessible through any web browser, FaceMe Platform 5.4 further improves the process for developers to add facial recognition to applications for ID verification, such as secure system login, and access control.
Facial Recognition
Google Drive, Gmail tighten AI-powered zero-trust controls
The new feature “automatically and continuously classifies and labels sensitive data and then applies appropriate risk-based controls,” she added. These controls such as DLP and CAA can be applied based on the customer’s risk tolerance and their security policies.
Security
Versa enhances SASE package with AI-based security tools
With our vast SASE deployment base, the telemetry data is leveraged to fine tune Large Language Models (LLMs) to bolster security in real time with a high degree of accuracy and automation, and optimize network operations and performance.”
Security
Portkey.ai closes $3M seed round to speed up AI application development 
Portkey claims its platform can help companies build AI software faster by reducing the number of features they must implement from scratch. Moreover, the startup promises to reduce the associated costs.
Artificial Intelligence
Suki Becomes First AI-Powered Healthcare Solution with Enhanced Ambient Integration Across Multiple EHR Systems
Building upon the introduction of bi-directional ambient sync for Epic, Suki, the leader in voice artificial intelligence (AI) technology for healthcare, is announcing a similar enhancement for Cerner. The most recent iteration of Suki Assistant empowers Cerner users to expedite the creation of clinical documentation with greater ease and efficiency, thereby alleviating cognitive load and reducing documentation time.
Automation & Productivity
AI-Generated Works Cannot Get Copyright: US Court
US District Judge Beryl Howell on Friday ruled that only works with human authors can receive copyrights in the United States. Stephen Thaler, computer scientist and creator of the DABUS AI system, had appealed the Copyright Office denial. The decision follows losses for Thaler’s efforts to acquire US patents for inventions created by DABUS, short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Science.
Artificial Intelligence
SpyCloud bags $110M to help companies respond to login credential leaks faster 
The company provides a software platform that helps companies detect when their employees’ login credentials leak online. The platform can, for example, spot if employee passwords associated with an internal supply chain application surface on a dark web forum. It also detects other types of leaked login credentials.
Privacy & Security
New Relic Enhances AIOps with the Industry’s 1st AI Recommended Alerts
The industry’s only observability solution that reduces the need to manually build numerous alert conditions using AI makes it easier to understand which signals are most important or what thresholds indicate performance problems. Now, every engineer, regardless of their experience level, can eliminate alerting blindspots—empowering them to detect, resolve, and respond to issues faster.
DevOps
Google adds new AI-powered security controls to its Workspace 
The features cover aspects of implementing zero-trust security, data loss prevention or DLP, and data privacy controls. Many involve a series of automated improvements that will continuously monitor data placed in Google Drive, using its AI engine. Administrators for Workspace, which Google claims is used by 9 million organizations, can set very granular context-aware policy controls, such as checking particular device locations.
Security
Proton debuts VPN for Business, enabling IT departments to control access to content and apps
The aptly named Proton VPN for Business starts at $8.99 per month (on a two-year contract) and enables IT departments to deploy virtual private gateways to control access to content and apps, as well as network segmentation. It also comes with built-in protections against malware, phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks. And it is open-source, allowing experts to independently verify its security claims.
Network Management
Styra announces new capabilities for its enterprise open policy agent 
The big change is the shift to making Enterprise OPA source available with a commercial license. Previously, the service was available in only two formats: binary or container. Although the formats supported the majority of use cases, they limited Enterprise OPA from being built directly into applications for performance optimization, which requires access to the source code.
Cloud
Meet SeamlessM4T, the Meta AI model that can translate 100 languages into speech or text
Officially dubbed SeamlessM4T, the multimodal technology has been publicly released to help researchers build on the development and introduce universal applications capable of delivering speech-to-speech, speech-to-text, text-to-speech and text-to-text translations. It has been made available along with SeamlessAlign, a multimodal translation dataset totaling 265,000 hours of mined speech and text alignments.
Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI now lets users fine-tune GPT-3.5 Turbo for specific tasks 
For instance, customers could create a bot based on GPT-3.5 Turbo that’s trained specifically to provide reliable responses in a specific language, or use concise wording. They could also train it on a specific knowledge base, and use the bot for customer or employee support use cases.
Automation & Productivity
TD SYNNEX gets into data migration transport biz
This is quite different from software-defined data migration services from suppliers such as Cirrus Data, Datadobi, Data Dynamics,  Komprise, which rely on network data transmission. It is akin to Seagate’s Lyve Drive Mobile Array offering, with its six drive bays for physically transporting data on the drives.
Data Management
Report: AI startup Hugging Face hoping to raise millions from Salesforce and other investors 
New York-based Hugging Face operates a number of projects, including the BigScience research initiative that has built what is claimed to be the world’s largest open-source natural language processing model. It also offers paid functionality such as AutoTrain, which helps to automate the task of training AI models, and Inference API, which allows developers to host neural networks without managing the underlying infrastructure.
Automation & Productivity
Neo4j brings vectors to graph database
With a vector, content is converted into a numerical value, with techniques such as Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) used to enable similarity search. There are a number of purpose-built vector databases such as Pinecone and Milvus in addition to existing database platforms that are being extended to support vectors including PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis.
Datta & Analytics
Fauna’s new query language is custom-built for its serverless database
Fauna Query Language is described as a strongly typed database language that combines the ability to express declarative queries and functional business logic in strongly consistent transactions. Unlike imperative queries, which specify exactly what information the database should retrieve, declarative queries describe the information and let the machine figure out how to find and deliver it.
Data & Analytics
Anaconda Distribution for Python Brings Data Science to Hundreds of Millions of Microsoft Excel Users
"Excel is the backbone of data analysis in business; with Python in Excel, we’re extending what is possible for our community and creating an ideal medium for data scientists to collaborate with colleagues that rely on Excel. This leap ushers in a new age of Excel where cutting edge visualizations, complex data manipulation, advanced analytics, and machine learning are just a few clicks away in a familiar environment.”
Data & Analytics
Tintri launches software-only VMstore and managed infrastructure service
“The new Tintri Cloud Platform and Tintri Cloud Engine offerings are a testament to our commitment to providing customers with all of the tools they need to manage their infrastructure, no matter the size of their workloads or where they are on their hybrid cloud transformation journey.”
Data Management
ScyllaDB Announces NoSQL Release With Raft for Strong Consistency
This new enterprise release introduces Raft-based strongly consistent schema management, distributed aggregates that reduce query execution time up to 20X, and numerous other features that further enhance ScyllaDB’s performance at scale. A new Change Data Capture library for Rust was also released, speeding up ScyllaDB’s real-time streaming while requiring less infrastructure.
Data & Analytics
Software Makers May Face Greater Liability in Wake of MOVEit Lawsuit
Right now it's unclear if this is the case with MOVEit, and as to what exactly Progress is liable for, Walke says. The software vendor patched the flaw at the heart of the Cl0p attacks on May 31, the same day the flaw was disclosed. However, the class-action suits claim the vulnerability had existed since 2021.
Privacy & Security
VMware and Nvidia join forces to support generative AI infrastructure for the enterprise
The new offering, called VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, is a full-stack platform that features generative AI software along with everything an enterprise customer needs to build, train, customize and deploy an AI model out of the box. It’s built on VMware Cloud Foundation and optimized for AI, featuring generative AI software and accelerated computing from Nvidia.
Artificial Intelligence
NCSA’s SMM Software Tools Aim to Make Sense of Social Media Data
“Our mission is to create a fully functional system for the acquisition, storage, sharing, analysis and visualization of social media data,” said Wang. “We are continuing to build out a portfolio of tools to serve different communities, including social scientists, educators, public health professionals and people in industry.”
Data & Analytics
Breaking down language walls: ElevenLabs launches multilingual text-to-speech for diverse audiences
“ElevenLabs was started with the dream of making all content universally accessible in any language and in any voice. With the release of Eleven Multilingual v2, we are one step closer to making this dream a reality and making human-quality AI voices available in every dialect,
Automation & Productivity
VMware repackages cloud offerings as part of a campaign to simplify multicloud management 
VMware Cloud, which combines the company’s Cloud Foundation software and Cloud Services, is being repackaged into five editions — Essentials, Standard, Pro, Advanced and Enterprise — that span the stages of cloud adoption in enterprises. The intent is to provide ”a prescriptive pathway for customers to buy and consume VMware cloud based on where they are in the journey to modernization,”
Cloud
VMware Tanzu Hub aims to be one-stop-shop for multicloud
One addition to TAP is the Tanzu Application Engine, currently in beta, which allows platform engineering teams to embed requirements like availability, secure connectivity and scalability into a curated “Application Space” that automates enforcement of requirements at runtime, regardless of what cloud or Kubernetes cluster the code is running in.
Cloud
Versa Delivers New AI-Assisted Enhancements Across SASE, SD-WAN, Security Service Edge (SSE), Zero Trust Everywhere (ZTEA), and SD-LAN Products
The Versa Unified SASE Platform integrates a panoramic data set from across the entire infrastructure – from the WAN Edge, Cloud, Campus, remote locations, users and devices – into a unified data lake. VersaAI™ taps into this data lake to extract AI/ML insights that are seamlessly applied across the Versa product suite.
Security
Israeli SaaS security platform startup Grip Security raises $41M
This is where Grip steps in, with an approach of leveraging identity as the primary control point to deliver a solution to discover, prioritize, secure and orchestrate the mitigation and remediation of identity risks. Grip claims that by using its platform, visibility is no longer the sole issue for security teams.
Security
Rubrik’s new generative AI assistant helps ease cyberattack recovery operations 
Specifically, the new tool helps companies to achieve three things: First, it creates a plan to help the company reach its recovery point objective with the cleanest, most recent data. It provides step-by-step guidance to recover unaffected files from the most recent snapshot, while rolling back affected files to the most recent snapshot prior to when the attack was first detected.
Security
Striim Launches Striim Cloud 4.2, Democratizing High-Performance Data Integration, Streaming, and AI
“With increased interest from our customers in deploying cloud-based data pipelines for real-time streaming analytics, and incorporating AI-based models for in-line event augmentation with generative AI – Striim is the only unified service that has an integrated intelligence engine with a real-time data integration platform,”
Data & Analytics
IBM developing S3 interface tape library
Diamondback S3 will be a low-cost repository target for a secure copy of current or archive data. It will enable any user familiar with S3 to move their data to Diamondback S3. A storage architect can sign up for a 14-day shared trial on a Diamondback S3 managed by IBM, so they can verify the behavior of S3 for tape.
Data Storage
Meta reportedly set to launch a web version of Threads this week 
The news comes as rival X continues to have no shortage of drama and issues — a prime opportunity for a decent competitor to take market share. The latest in the real-life, badly scripted soap opera, which is X under the control of Elon Musk, includes X seeing a dramatic decrease in downloads and app store ratings since Musk changed the name of the service from Twitter.
Social Media
Nutanix puts ChatGPT in a turnkey box
Nutanix wants to make it easier for customers to trial and use LLMs by crafting a software stack including its Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Nutanix Files and Objects storage, and Nutanix AHV hypervisor and Kubernetes (K8S) software with Nvidia GPU acceleration.
ChatGPT
SADA Releases New Enterprise Data Warehouse Modernization Solution
SADA’s EDW services include a discovery assessment, a foundation proof of concept implementation, and a complete Data Warehouse Platform Migration. SADA is partnering with FiveTran and ThoughtSpot, who will help implement these services and transform data into actionable insights.
Data & Analytics
CISA warns that hackers are actively targeting Citrix’s ShareFile platform 
The platform allows customers to store data in a Citrix-managed cloud environment or on their own infrastructure. According to Citrix, CVE-2023-24489 only affects deployments that use the latter configuration. As a result, organizations running ShareFile on Citrix’s cloud infrastructure are not affected.
Security
ThunderSoft Modernizing FOTA Platform with AWS IoT Core
ThunderSoft, a leading provider of operating system technologies and superior edge-to-cloud products and solutions announced its modernizing Firmware Over The Air (FOTA) solution with AWS IoT Core, a service that allows customers to connect billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices without managing infrastructure,
IoT
Cybersecurity company discovers phishing campaign that uses malicious QR codes 
Malicious QR codes can be difficult to spot because they encode a phishing link in a visual form, while email security tools are mainly designed to detect standard links. Furthermore, hackers can embed a malicious QR code in another file such as a PDF document to create an additional layer of obfuscation. That makes it even more difficult for organizations to spot phishing attempts.
Security
DynamoFL Raises $15.1M Series A to Scale Privacy-Focused Generative AI for the Enterprise
As government agencies like the FTC explore concerns around LLM providers’ data security, DynamoFL’s machine learning privacy research team recently showed how personal information – including sensitive details about C-Suite executives, Fortune 500 corporations, and private contract values – could be easily extracted from a fine-tuned GPT-3 model. DynamoFL’s privacy evaluation suite provides out of the box testing for data extraction vulnerabilities and automated documentation to ensure enterprises’ LLMs are secure and compliant.
Data Privacy
Former Google researchers launch startup to build nature-inspired neural networks 
The primary innovation in the technology is a software mechanism called attention. Using this mechanism, an AI model can take a large amount of contextual information into account when analyzing a piece of data. Furthermore, the model can prioritize that contextual information and pay more attention to the most important details.
Automation & Productivity
Nyriad and RackTop Systems Partner to Advance Secure File Storage
A key differentiator of the revolutionary solution is RackTop’s BrickStor Security Platform which continually evaluates trust at the file level, while Nyriad’s UltraIO storage system ensures data integrity at the erasure coded block level. This unique approach dynamically protects data during all three phases of a ransomware attack. BrickStor SP grants or denies access to data in real time without any agents,
Data Storage
Edgecore Networks Introduces New Switches with Cutting-Edge Connectivity for Powering Smart Buildings and IoT-enabled Venues
Small but complete in every detail, the ECS1100 series offers comprehensive solutions with 5 to 10 ports and PoE capabilities ranging from 120W to 250W, making it the most cost-effective prime choice in managed PoE switches for small offices, coffee shops, campuses, and more.
Smart Technology
Marqo Secures $5.2M to Bring Continuous-Learning Vector Search to Businesses
"There is over 100 trillion gigabytes of data in the world, the majority of which is unstructured data such as text, images or video. With generative AI creating more content than ever before people, computers and companies need new ways to search. Marqo represents the next generation of search – hyper-relevant, AI-powered and based on human understanding."
Automation & Productivity
CISA releases cyber defense plan for remote monitoring and management software 
There are two pillars to the plan. Pillar 1, Operational Collaboration, is said to encourage collective action across the RMM community to enhance information sharing, increase visibility and fuel creative cybersecurity solutions. So-called “lines of effort” include cyber threat and vulnerability information and enduring RMM operational community.
Security
Arthur launches open-source tool to help companies make data-driven decisions about LLMs 
To assist in this evaluation, Arthur also unveiled the Generative Assessment Project. This research project ranks the strengths and weaknesses of LLM offerings on the market from industry leaders such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms Inc. and shares discoveries with the public about their metrics.
Data & Analytics
Elemental Cognition, led by IBM Watson’s former head, raises $60M 
Founded in 2015, Elemental Cognition pitches its offering an “AI that thinks before it talks” with answers that are “provably correct and fully transparent” to “solve your toughest problems.” The company has as its vision that “We believe that AI’s potential for good is realized only if it can be understood and trusted by people.”
Artificial Intelligence
Would you sell your data for passive income? Caden raises $15M to give users the option
Founded in 2021, Caden addresses the challenge of user control by placing end users at the center of a data exchange with a two-sided platform. At one side sits an app that allows consumers to automatically pull in personal activity data, such as the movies they watch, where they travel and what they buy from different businesses. They then opt-in to monetize some or all of that information in various privacy-centered ways, creating a safe passive income stream.
Data & Analytics
Google DeepMind reportedly developing at least 21 new generative AI features 
The search giant’s engineers are reportedly working on at least 21 different generative AI capabilities. One of the main highlights is a feature that can reportedly provide advice about “challenges in people’s lives.” A sample prompt obtained by the Times suggests the feature can process complex user queries containing several lines of text.
Artificial Intelligence
IBM Consulting to help firms build generative AI applications with Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service 
IBM says it’s a fully managed AI service that’s focused on helping developers and data scientists use OpenAI LP’s powerful large language models to build new kinds of applications. Through the service, developers can access all of OpenAI’s LLMs, including the GPT series that powers ChatGPT, and the Codex LLMs.
Artificial Intelligence
AptEdge.io leverages AI and AnswerGPT to reduce customer escalations 
“AnswerGPT was built around the idea that if we can connect to different areas of information and knowledge, if we can connect to those areas and be able to create answers, find the knowledge, find the answer, get to responses immediately, we can arm our customer-facing teams with instant and accurate answers to questions from customers in real time,"
Automation & Productivity
New York City bans TikTok on government devices over security concerns 
Despite TikTok’s many efforts to convince the U.S. that the app is not a virtual spying machine for the Chinese Communist Party, slowly but surely it has been disappearing from government devices all over the country. It’s currently banned in 30 states, including New York State, which got rid of it around two years ago.
Privacy & Security
PowerShell Gallery Prone to Typosquatting, Other Supply Chain Attacks
"If your organization uses PowerShell modules from the gallery, we suggest only using signed PowerShell modules, utilizing trusted private repositories, and exercising caution when downloading new modules/scripts from registries,"
Security
FloQast Extends Out-of-the-Box Integration with Microsoft Visio, SharePoint, & Word
FloQast’s latest integrations with Microsoft extend and enhance FloQast’s existing out-of-the-box integrations with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP, OneDrive, Excel, Teams, and Outlook and are offered free of charge to customers.
Automation & Productivity
Google and Deloitte team to connect data science and marketing with AI
ConvergeCONSUMER also now incorporates Google Cloud’s Generative AI App Builder and Generative AI Studio so businesses can quickly develop chatbots, search engines and other tools. The suite of tools uses the Google Cloud Cortex Framework to help enterprises enhance data and generate insights about how they operate, plan and forecast
Automation & Productivity
Certinia Release Introduces AI Functionality and Updates Improving Productivity, Efficiency, and Decision Making
The Summer 2023 product release includes updates that support the following use cases: identifying risk and proactive mitigations to scheduled project work, improving service margins, as well as predicting days to pay in cash flow forecasting.
Automation & Productivity
Discord.io suffers data breach with 760,000+ users’ info stolen 
For the sake of clarity, Discord.io is not affiliated with Discord, but acts as a third-party marketplace where users can create and list custom invites to their Discord channels for discovery. On the service, users can provide attributes and information about their communities so that people can more easily find and join them
Security
Dialpad launches generative AI trained on 5 years of proprietary conversational data
The San Francisco-based company, which was founded in 2011 and says it is on a mission to become the “Salesforce of AI,” developed the generative AI model over five years and five billion minutes of proprietary conversational data. DialpadGPT will be added to the company’s AI-powered platform for video meetings, calls and team collaboration.
Data & Analytics
AI startup Grit nabs $7M to help developers fix technical debt faster 
Software teams spend a significant portion of their work day fixing suboptimal code. New York-based Grit has developed an AI platform that promises to speed up the task. According to the startup, its platform can find technical debt in an application’s code base and generate new, more efficient code with which it can be replaced.
Automation & Productivity
Google enhances Search Generative Experience with AI summaries and definitions 
The first enhancement the company detailed today is rolling out for the panel in which SGE displays its responses to users’ search queries. According to Google, users will receive the ability to hover over certain words in an AI-generated response to access a definition. Hovering over the word “proton,” for example, might bring up a brief explanation of the subatomic particle.
Automation & Productivity
Hackers target Citrix NetScaler vulnerabilities to gain persistent access 
Citrix NetScaler is an application delivery controller and load-balancing solution offered by Citrix Systems Inc. The devices optimize the delivery of applications over the internet and private networks by distributing traffic across multiple servers, ensuring that application performance is maintained and downtime is minimized.
Security
Redis scales vector data, improves data integration capabilities
“This platform is really built to be a remote data structure server, not a database,” Trollope told VentureBeat. “It provides an ability to take what I’m already doing on my local software, outsource it and put it into a distributed system that can do it way faster and make my application that much more clean and simple.”
Data & Analytics
MongoDB Announces General Availability of End-To-End Data Encryption Tech
MongoDB Queryable Encryption significantly reduces the risk of data exposure for organizations and improves developer productivity by providing built-in encryption capabilities for highly sensitive application workflows—such as searching employee records, processing financial transactions, or analyzing medical records—with no cryptography expertise required
Data Management
Nutanix puts ChatGPT in a turnkey box
GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a type of machine learning large language model (LLM) which can interpret text requests and questions, search through multiple source files and respond with text, image, video or even software code output.
ChatGPT
SQream Expands its End-To-End Low-Code Analytics Platform with Flex Connector AI Assistant
This tool will make it even easier for users to collect all of their business data – from CRMs, user applications, and other tools – into one single source, and further minimize the technical requirements to generate quick data insights.
Data & Analytics
The New York Times bans use of its content to train AI
To address some of these concerns, OpenAI has recently announced that publishers will be able to block its GPTBot web crawler aimed at improving AI models from scraping their websites
Artificial Intelligence
Grit debuts with $7M round, offering AI that auto-analyzes and updates software codebase for devs
“You have experts who go in with scalpels and modify code line-by-line. But what we’re seeing with generative AI is it’s much easier to generate new code. So we just need new tools that are able to move code at scale, like bulldozers.”
DevOps
Anthropic raises $100M from SK Telecom to build AI for telecommunications 
Anthropic is best known for its chatbot Claude, a powerful generative AI model and rival to OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT. The company recently released multiple upgrades to Claude, providing it with numerous capabilities including larger context windows and the ability to read a novel in under a minute.
Automation & Productivity
Zenhub unveils AI label suggestions and a roadmap of many more features ‘coming soon’
He added that Zenhub is considering incorporating “IBM’s Watsonx models and capabilities as a way to bring our AI experience to our on-premise customers.”
Automation & Productivity
Clari acquires rival Groove to enhance its sales platform 
One core focus of the company’s platform is helping salespeople become more convincing. According to Clari, its platform can analyze a sales representative’s conversations with potential customers and highlight areas for improvement. The software could, for example, point out if representatives should mention a certain popular feature of their company’s product more often
Automation & Productivity
Amazon adds AI-powered review summaries to its e-commerce marketplace 
Located immediately below each AI-generated review summary is a collection of clickable keywords. If many customers write that a product is user-friendly, Amazon might display a tag that reads “Ease of Use.” Clicking that tag would bring up another AI-generated summary detailing why customers consider the product easy to use.
E-Commerce
EY breach exposes Bank of America customer credit card numbers
Experts we‘ve talked to fear that Cl0p has opened Pandora‘s box. Since the chain of attacks showcases a nearly perfect supply-chain hack, where just one software exploit opened the doors to thousands of companies, other criminal groups will be keen to replicate Cl0p‘s success.
Security
Stellar Cyber and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Partner to Offer Expanded Cybersecurity Capabilities
With integrations and support for all enterprise data sources, field-vetted AI/ML-driven correlation, and purpose-built intelligent automation, the Stellar Cyber Open XDR platform eliminates manually-intensive security tasks while enabling security teams to quickly monitor, identify, and respond to threats in their cloud, on premises, OT and hybrid environments.
Security
Google launches Pricing API to help enterprises optimize cloud costs
“What specifically differentiates it from the Catalog API is that it shows your negotiated contract pricing and discounts, if any, for all the SKUs, specific to your account,"
Cloud
IBM set to deliver mainframe AI services, support
Set for delivery on Sept. 29, z/OS 3.1, the operating system grows IBM’s AI portfolio to let customers securely deploy AI applications co-located with z/OS applications and data, as well as a variety of new features such as container extensions for Red Hat and Linux applications that better support hybrid cloud applications on the Big Iron.
Artificial Intelligence
Atmosfy raises $12M for its app that lets you discover local businesses through immersive short videos
While video has taken over as the go-to method for consuming content online, the world of online reviews seems stuck in the past, relying on old-fashioned static images, dated text descriptions, and the same old star rating system from the era of print media.
Social Media
Hammerspace notches up AWS global rendering partnership
According to an AWS blog, AWS Thinkbox Deadline serves as a render manager that allows users to use a mix of on-premises, hybrid, or cloud-based resources for rendering tasks. The platform offers plugins tailored for specific workflows. The Spot Event Plugin (SEP) oversees and dynamically scales a cloud-based render farm based on the task volume in the render queue.
Automation & Productivity
US Probes Microsoft Email Breach, Cloud Security
“The CSRB will assess the recent Microsoft Exchange Online intrusion … and conduct a broader review of issues relating to cloud-based identity and authentication infrastructure affecting applicable CSPs [cloud service providers] and their customers,”
Security
XWorm, Remcos RAT Evade EDRs to Infect Critical Infrastructure
Eventually, this chain culminates in the loading of XWorm malware establishing communication with a command-and-control (C2) server, an analysis by the firm revealed. XWorm can carry out a wide range of functions, from loading ransomware to acting as a persistent backdoor.
Security
Quest Software Empowers Data Democratization and Accelerates Innovation with Erwin Data Modeler 12.5
The solution meticulously documents existing data sets, facilitating accurate and efficient migration to new cloud environments, thereby optimizing data operations and fostering data-driven innovation.
Data Management
Red Hat rivals form Open Enterprise Linux Association
Three of Red Hat’s chief enterprise Linux competitors are banding together to create an alternative to Red Hat-based software, after the company made changes to its terms of use earlier this summer, making it more difficult to access its source code.
DevOps
Wanclouds Launches Enhanced Multi-Cloud Migration and Disaster Recovery as a Service Capabilities
For companies running SAP on VMware on-premise, or in the cloud, backing up or migrating SAP applications and HANA databases has been historically cumbersome and costly. Wanclouds’ VPC+ SaaS application reduces these costs and technical complexities to bring simplicity and speed to migrating and backing up SAP applications to public clouds or across clouds.
Cloud
Alias Technologies Launches BeFake An Innovative AI-Driven Mobile App Challenging the Social Media Authenticity Status Quo
Powered by Alias Technologies’ cutting-edge AI, the BeFake app is an engaging way to amplify your presence on social media, using your own imagination to create something new. Users input text prompts, transforming them into captivating augmented visuals. From creative selfies to imaginative group photos, BeFake allows individuals to vividly express their authenticity, transcending the limitations of the physical world to explore the vast expanse of their creativity.
Social Media
Check Point to Acquire Perimeter 81 to Deliver the Fastest and most Secure SASE Solution in the Industry
The company, recognized as a leader in the Forrester Zero Trust Wave, brings an innovative approach to SSE that combines cloud and on-device protection. Perimeter 81 is offering a unique suite of capabilities, including Zero Trust Access, full mesh connectivity between users, branches and applications.
Security
Osano Secures $25M Series B to Advance Data Privacy Platform
As organizations expand their global footprint, evolving regulations, laws and standards have unique requirements that must be met to maintain compliance. With Osano, business leaders can rest assured that their data privacy and compliance programs are up to par and resources are reallocated to focus on compliance tasks that can’t be automated.
Data Privacy
SandboxAQ unveils Sandwich, an open-source meta-library of cryptographic algorithms
It furnishes developers with a unified API, enabling the integration of chosen cryptographic algorithms into applications. According to SandboxAQ, this agility permits adaptation to evolving technologies and threats and mitigates the necessity for code rewrites.
DevOps
Unravel Data Launches Cloud Data Cost Observability and Optimization for Google Cloud BigQuery
This launch comes on the heels of the recent BigQuery pricing model change that replaced flat-rate and flex slot pricing with three new pricing tiers, and will help BigQuery customers to implement FinOps in real-time to select the right new pricing plan based on their usage, and maximize workloads for greater return on cloud data investments.
Data & Analytics
Microsoft changes Services Agreement to add restrictions for AI offerings
The Microsoft Services Agreement changes come at a moment when Terms of Service changes related to AI are making headlines. For example, video conferencing and messaging provider Zoom is facing severe backlash for changes it quietly made to its Terms of Service (TOS) back in March related to AI — raising new questions about customer privacy, choice and trust
Artificial Intelligence
Dell Credentials Bug Opens VMware Environments to Takeover
Dell Compellent reached its end of life in 2019, and holds less than a 1% share of the data storage market, according to Enlyft. However, organizations still using Dell storage integrated with VMware environments need be aware of CVE-2023-39250, a "high" impact vulnerability affecting these systems.
Security
Bionic Announces Integration with ServiceNow for Industry Leading Application Security Posture Management
Bionic, the industry’s first Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform at Black Hat USA 2023 announced a series of new product innovations to help enterprises manage application risk in production. Bionic has introduced a new ServiceNow Service Graph Connector that provides engineering and security teams with a real-time configuration management database (CMDB) of their cloud applications, microservices, and dependencies in production.
Security
Cloud-based workspace collaboration startup Genemod launches new AI solution 
Genemod AI uses machine learning algorithms to facilitate collaboration in the realms of electronic lab notebooks and inventory management. The new solution includes features to perform tasks such as streamlining documentation, providing secure, traceable backups accessible from any location and to manage large quantities of data effectively.
Automation & Productivity
CISA: 'Whirlpool' Backdoor Sends Barracuda ESG Security Down the Drain
CISA identified Whirlpool as a backdoor that establishes a Transport Layer Security (TLS) reverse shell to the attacker's command-and-control (C2) server. Malicious traffic in these reverse shells can be hard to detect because the traffic is encrypted, and often blends in with normal HTTPS traffic
Security
FiscalNote Launches “FiscalNoteGPT”, a Generative AI System Built Specifically for the Policy and Regulatory Industry
Among its initial capabilities, FiscalNoteGPT assists customers by identifying pressing policy and regulatory concerns, generating new insights and recommendations, summarizing timely and relevant issues, and finding pertinent answers and information from FiscalNote’s proprietary databases, consisting of thousands of trusted internal and external sources which form the basis of FiscalNote’s award-winning, incisive, and actionable content
Automation & Productivity
Microsoft shuts down Cortana app on Windows 11
Microsoft is now working on Windows Copilot, a new sidebar for Windows 11 that is powered by Bing Chat and can control Windows settings, answer questions, and lots more. Windows Copilot is expected to be available this fall as part of a Windows 11 update that will also include native RAR and 7-Zip support.
Automation & Productivity
Rasgo launches Rasgo AI, a generative AI agent for enterprise data warehouse analytics
Unlike other GPT integrations that provide only natural language chat interfaces, Rasgo said its AI stands out by employing GPT for “intelligent reasoning,” which enables it to think and act like a knowledgeable business analyst for data warehouses.
Data & Analytics
CISA Adds Microsoft .NET Vulnerability to KEV Catalog Due to Active Exploitation
"Proof-of-concept exploit code is available, or an attack demonstration is not practical for most systems," the company said. "The code or technique is not functional in all situations and may require substantial modification by a skilled attacker."
Security
Fireblocks researchers uncover ‘BitForge’ vulnerability affecting multiple crypto wallets 
The researchers explained that the BitForge vulnerability affects wallets that implement particular multiparty computation protocols, including GG-18, GG-20 and Lindell 17. This is an important security measure in digital asset transactions that enables multiple parties to agree to execute a transaction by dividing a single private key among them. This makes a crypto wallet more difficult to hack and also means that no one person can access the funds without the others.
Blockchain
Verizon’s BlueJeans surrenders to Zoom. What went wrong?
“This acquisition is ultimately yet another proof point that carriers struggle to provide and sell end-user services other than pushing bandwidth through a network,” Park said. “It’s not that service providers lack distribution, customer touch points or business synergy; they just lack the attention span to build a business model on anything that isn’t bandwidth.”
Automation & Productivity
Scaleflux ups computational storage SSD capacity
The company provides CSD 3000 drives featuring an SFX 3000 ASIC, a system-on-chip with twin quad-core ARM processors, hardware compute engine, and a PCIe gen 4 interface. It provides transparent compression/decompression, increases the drive’s logical capacity, and also its endurance by reducing the drive’s write storage burden.
Data Storage
Cisco bolsters mobile core technology with Working Group Two buy
Introduced in February, the Mobility Service is designed to simplify how service providers build, manage, and deliver new mobile services globally at scale and supports a variety of technologies to bring 5G, edge, and cloud technologies, Cisco says.
Network Management
Amplitude adds AI features to simplify business intelligence queries and data governance 
“The goal of Ask Amplitude is not just to tell you the latest viral cat videos. It’s to teach you how to build a funnel analysis, which events in your taxonomy represent watching videos and subscribing, and which properties contain the video and platform information,” he wrote. “The resulting chart is a foundation of knowledge for you to build on and answer all sorts of follow-up questions on your own.”
Automation & Productivity
Incident management platform startup Rootly raises $12M to accelerate its product roadmap 
Rootly argues that the growing complexity of information technology systems and the continued push toward remote work have made managing and resolving incidents harder than ever. The company claims that its platform differs in that while other tools act as fire alarms for incidents, “none can automate putting out the fire the way Rootly can.”
Automation & Productivity
Western Digital enhances OpenFlex JBOF
The SN655 provides up to 1,100,000/125,000 random read/write IOPS and sequential read/write speeds of up to 6.8/3.7GBps. In comparison, the older SN650 model achieved up to 970,000/109,000 random read/write IOPS and a sequential speed of 0.66/2.8GBps.
Data Storage
AI data exploration startup Virtualitics raises $37M for growth and innovation 
Virtualitics’ main offering is “Intelligent Data Exploration,” which delivers AI capabilities that make advanced analytics possible for more people and organizations. The Virtualitics AI technology automatically discovers hidden patterns in complex, multidimensional data, delivering 3D visuals and immersive experiences that guide more informed decisions.
Data & Analytics
DataRobot announces new applied generative AI offering for building trustworthy AI apps 
These enterprise-grade LLMs allow businesses to do research using their own internal data and records, quickly summarize large documents and receive answers using natural conversational language.
Artificial Intelligence
Sweet Security raises $12M for its cloud runtime defense platform 
Sweet’s Cloud Runtime Security Suite features include detection and response, discovery and prevention – all in runtime. The runtime sensor takes under five minutes to deploy and immediately provides cloud-native cluster visibility, streaming key application data and business logic to its servers to profile workload behavior anomalies and contextualize them with traditional tactics, techniques and procedures.
Security
Aptos Labs partners with Microsoft to build AI blockchain solutions using OpenAI 
Aptos Labs is a Layer 1 blockchain, meaning that the technology is designed to facilitate digital asset trading and transactions at a large scale. It was designed to rival blockchain ecosystems such as Ethereum, which is the second-largest blockchain by market capitalization It provides programmable smart contract transactions through a scripting language called Move.
Blockchain
Radiant Security Announces Revolutionary AI-Powered SOC Co-Pilot
“It was never feasible for SOC analysts to review every alert they received. There aren’t enough hours in the day or analysts in the SOC for this to work. Instead, alerts end up being filtered out or left unaddressed, thus creating blindspots where attacks can go undetected,”
Security
Aerospike Unveils New Curated Dashboards for Comprehensive Observability and Management
The new dashboards provide comprehensive observability of the Aerospike Real-time Data Platform across multiple clouds, data centers, regions, clusters and nodes. With intuitive navigation, customers can quickly search for and see the metrics that matter most, drill down to granular details and set up custom alerting enriched with severity information and related alerts
Data & Analytics
Oracle Delivers OCI Compute Services Anywhere with Compute Cloud@Customer
Organizations can use the same OCI services in their data centers and Oracle Cloud Regions, while developers and IT managers can use the same APIs and management tools to deliver a consistent user experience everywhere. Organizations can also consolidate existing workloads and deploy new cloud-native applications on a fully managed cloud platform in their data centers, enabling them to capitalize on OCI’s cost-effective consumption model to streamline operations and reduce costs.
Cloud
AIxCC competition offers $18M for AI-driven cybersecurity solutions
The challenge is led by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in collaboration with top AI companies including Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. DARPA has committed $18.5 million in prize money for the competition, with $4 million as the top prize.
Security
AI-powered observability startup Middleware closes on $6.5M funding round 
Middleware has built what it says is a disruptive and powerful, AI-based cloud observability platform that’s specifically designed to monitor modern software applications. The vast majority of today’s applications are based on newer technologies such as Kubernetes, microservices and distributed systems, making it more difficult for enterprises to understand their behavior.
Cloud
Jericho Security secures $3M to counter AI-powered phishing attacks 
Jericho assists enterprises in defending against social engineering phishing attacks by leveraging AI to create sophisticated simulations and educational content for employees. In the company’s own words, it “uses AI to fight AI,” acting as a white hat for organizations.
Security
Solvo introduces SecurityGenie, a prompt-based cloud security solution 
Powered by technology from OpenAI LP, SecurityGenie uses natural language processing to assist security engineers and executives in quickly identifying and remediating security risks such as misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and compliance violations. SecurityGenie allows users to ask questions about their cloud resources, networks, databases, entitlements and identities and can scan a corporate environment to provide comprehensive answers.
Security
Microsoft unveils next-gen AI solutions to boost frontline productivity amid labor challenges
Microsoft says that over 60% of these workers grapple with monotonous tasks that detract from more meaningful endeavors. Confronted by mounting challenges stemming from labor shortages, skill gaps and supply chain disruptions, frontline workers have been increasingly tackling complex work demands.
Automation & Productivity
Deepset raises $30M to help enterprises unlock the value of LLMs
By 2025, the global datasphere is expected to grow to 163 zettabytes. Of this, the data from enterprise systems will be nearly 60%, meaning teams will have a mountain of data to deal with. This will make searching, retrieving, summarizing and analyzing relevant, work-related information quite a task.
Data Management
HPE teams with PhoenixNAP for bare metal cloud offerings
Bare metal servers are basically virtual machines with no operating environment. You select the number of cores, memory, storage, and networking bandwidth, and the hardware is provisioned for you, but you have to bring your own operating system, platform, and operating environment.
Cloud
Osano secures $25M to expand its privacy compliance platform 
The suite is designed to simplify privacy compliance by helping organizations build, manage and scale their privacy program to increase trust and stay compliant. Osano claims that users of its suite can “serve as stewards of consumer privacy” with automated, simplified compliance that ensures consumer consent.
Data Privacy
Kyndryl and Microsoft Collaborate to Speed the Evaluation and Adoption of Enterprise-Grade Generative AI for Business
Leveraging the partnership’s Joint Innovation Centers, Kyndryl’s growing patent portfolio in data and AI, and its access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Fabric, the two companies will rapidly design, develop and drive new generative AI innovations and solutions across their enterprises
Artificial Intelligence
Weights and biases raises $50M to advance LLMOps efforts for generative AI
One of the first tools that Weights and Biases announced for LLMOps is the company’s W&B Prompts tool, which is now being enhanced to expand the scope of what it can do. The latest update to the prompt tool can log all of a user’s LLM requests and helps to enable larger production scale use cases.
Automation & Productivity
IBM to launch Meta’s Llama 2 on WatsonX, an enterprise AI platform for businesses
IBM also added that after the launch of Meta’s open-source AI model, it plans to introduce more software like AI tuning studios, fact sheets, and other generative AI models,
Artificial Intelligence
Airbyte Makes Hundreds of Data Sources Available for AI Applications
The vector database destination in Airbyte now enables users to configure the full ELT pipeline, starting from extracting records from a wide variety of sources to separating unstructured and structured data, preparing and embedding text contents of records, and finally loading them into vector databases – all through a single, user-friendly interface.
Data & Analytics
Got vulns? vuln_GPT debuts as AI-powered approach to find and remediate software vulnerabilities
Vicarius announced its vuln_GPT initiative, an LLM designed to help organizations quickly find and create scripts for vulnerability management and remediation using simple queries. Vicarius has a community known as vsociety where researchers and users can collaborate and submit their own remediations for known security vulnerabilities
Artificial Intelligence
Horizon3.ai raises $40M to build out its enterprise-wide proactive security platform
Horizon3.ai’s fully automated NodeZero solution assesses the attack surface of a hybrid cloud – cloud-native, on-premises, edge and the internet of things and does not require agents to be installed or attack scripts to be written or maintained. The solution discovers and fingerprints an attack surface, identifying the ways exploitable vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, harvested credentials and dangerous product defaults can be chained together to facilitate a compromise.
Security
Kognitos goes self-service with business automation powered by generative AI
With the self-service model, Gill explained, business users can for example use the Kognitos service to extract data coming out of an invoice or a purchase order and use it as part of a larger business process.
Automation & Productivity
AI-generated deepfake books were just sold on Amazon under a real author’s name 
In a blog post, she explained that persuading Amazon to take the books down was far from simple. When she told the company that someone was writing under her name without her consent, she was asked, “Please provide us with any trademark registration numbers that relate to your claim.” She said she didn’t have one, after which Amazon sent a message back saying the books were staying and the case was closed.
Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI launches web crawling GPTBot, sparking blocking effort by website owners and creators
Without fanfare or an official announcement, ChatGPT maker OpenAI launched a new website crawling bot this week for scanning website content to train its large language models (LLMs). But after news of the bot broke, a revolt ensued, as website owners and creators quickly traded tips on how to block GPTBot from scraping their sites’ data.
Artificial Intelligence
Multiplayer emerges from Stealth with $3M in funding to make it easier for teams to work on distributed software with AI
 “This is an idea whose time has come. With distributed software being the norm today and teams being more spread out than ever, the gap in the market for a tool like Multiplayer has become very clear. Developers no longer need to bypass design reviews because they are ‘too much trouble.’ Multiplayer gives them an easy, organized way to share ideas and information before final implementation.”
DevOps
Metaplane Announces Major Update to Monitoring Capabilities
Metaplane has also expanded its data monitoring capabilities for Snowflake customers, providing visibility into the freshness and row count for every table in their database, not just the ones they choose to monitor. This valuable metadata ensures that users can easily delve into unmonitored data whenever necessary and eliminates the typical 3-5 day training period for adding new row count and freshness monitors, allowing users to start monitoring data instantly.
Data & Analytics
Rackspace Launches Hosted Private Cloud Generative AI Solution Architecture, Powered by Dell Technologies and NVIDIA AI
The solution can be deployed and managed at an “AI-ready” Rackspace data center within Rackspace’s global footprint or on-customer premises, so customers can focus on innovation and take advantage of cloud adjacency and performance.
Cloud
Introducing opentext.ai and OpenText Aviator
With the acquisition of Micro Focus in January 2023, OpenText expanded its mission to include new AI capabilities with Vertica and IDOL, including geospatial and time series analytics, in-database machine learning, unstructured data analytics, sentiment analysis, etc. Moreover, OpenText has layered in world-class cybersecurity, protecting data and metadata at the code level, within core applications, and in the cloud as it engages with machine learning engines.
Data & Analytics
MaxLinear pushes out 3rd gen Panther storage accelerator
MaxLinear says its new card is designed for storage workloads such as database acceleration, storage offload, encryption, compression, and deduplication enablement for maximum data reduction. The company says the Internet of Things, HPC, AI/ML and analytics workloads are all increasing storage IO needs.
Data Storage
FeatureByte Unveils Its Self-Service Feature Platform
One of the key challenges in enterprise AI is the significant time and effort required to prepare, deploy and manage data (also called Feature Engineering). With the FeatureByte platform, enterprises can accelerate AI innovation by enabling data scientists and ML engineers to focus on creative problem solving and iterating rapidly on live data.
Data & Analytics
Rubrik acquires data security startup Laminar for reported $100M+ 
According to the startup, its platform can automatically map out all the records in a company’s cloud environment. The software then uses machine learning to automatically find files that contain sensitive data such as passwords.
Data Management
Nephio R1 aims to simplify open-source cloud-native automation for telcos
Nephio was started in April 2022 with seed code from Google and the support of multiple telco vendors to help automate cloud-native operations for 5G. The Nephio community has grown to more than 70 organizations since its launch last year and the code is now ready for its first release (R1).
Automation & Productivity
Freshworks Unveils AI-Powered Customer Service Suite with Freddy Generative AI Integration
"The new Freshworks Customer Service Suite is firmly rooted in generative AI technology and empowers businesses to automate customer resolutions, supercharge agent productivity and make smart decisions quickly at a price point that every company wants,"
Automation & Productivity
Stability AI launches StableCode, an LLM for code generation
StableCode is being made available at three different levels: a base model for general use cases, an instruction model, and a long-context-window model that can support up to 16,000 tokens.
Automation & Productivity
NetSPI bridges security gaps with new ML/AI pentesting solution 
Claimed to be the first of its kind, NetSPI’s ML/AI Pentesting solution focuses on two core components: identifying, analyzing and remediating vulnerabilities on machine learning systems such as large language models, and providing grounded advice and real-world guidance to ensure security is considered from ideation to implementation.
Security
Bud Financial launches Bud.ai, a generative AI platform for hyper-personalized banking
The company asserts that by integrating its large language model (LLM) technology, financial services organizations can unlock the potential of their vast amounts of unstructured data, gaining clearer insights into individual financial positions or a detailed view of a bank’s portfolio, all through a single integration.
Automation & Productivity
Simon Data reels in $54M for its AI-powered customer data platform
Simon Data’s platform includes built-in machine learning models for processing marketing records. The models can determine the likelihood that a website visitor will make a purchase, forecast customer churn and perform related tasks.
Data & Analytics
Tractian gets $45M to expand AI monitoring of industrial machinery
Tractian uses sensors, edge computing hardware, and AI models to monitor industrial machines and identify potential failures based on vibrations and frequency patterns. The company’s AI analyzes machines’ “fingerprints” to detect specific mechanical issues like wear, imbalance and misalignment.
Automation & Productivity
Syxsense adds generative AI to its endpoint management suite 
Cortex Copilot enables information technology and security administrators to simplify and speed up the process of creating endpoint management and security workflows by allowing them to use natural language queries to automate tasks and generate scripts.
IT Management
FBI investigates ransomware attack on California-based healthcare provider 
As of Sunday evening EDT, hospitals and medical clinics run by Prospect were struggling to restore services. The East Connecticut Health Network advised on its website that all elective surgery, outpatient medical imaging, outpatient blood draw, urgent care and its wound center are closed until further notice.
Security
Hopr.co Granted Second Patent for Secure Communications Technology
“Platform for Optimizing Secure Communications,” by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO.) The patent extends Hopr’s initial “Password Hopping System” technology to cloud machines with a new and more sophisticated feature that addresses the increased cyber risk of legacy transport security by catering to the speed and scale of cloud operations.
Security
Protecting data in the era of generative AI: Nightfall AI launches innovative security platform
The challenge is to keep confidential data secure while allowing employees to be more productive using gen AI and ChatGPT at the browser, app and API levels. Cloud data loss prevention (DLP) platform Nightfall AI today announced the first data security platform for gen AI that spans API browser and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application gen AI protection.
Security
Neptune Software Delivers Innovative No-Code Tools for Business Technologists and Enterprise Developers
With the no-code app building feature, users can quickly start a fast app development journey, even with minimal technical knowledge.A simple drag-and-drop designer, coupled with pre-made application building blocks, enables true rapid application development, allowing users to build applications for mobile, tablet, and desktop simultaneously, once, and ensuring a seamless user experience across devices.
DevOps
Salesforce introduces design studio for AI model development
Organizations can use Einstein Studio with real-time customer data from the Data Cloud, which connects customer data from any source and aggregates it into a single customer profile. The platform eliminates the need for an extract/transfer/load stage when used with SageMaker and provides point-and-click access to data in the data cloud. The company has also published a Python software development kit for connections to other sources.
Automation & Productivity
OpenAI adds ‘huge set’ of ChatGPT updates, including suggested prompts, multiple file uploads
Among the new features Kilpatrick highlighted are example prompts (already visible for the author, see screenshot below), suggested replies and follow-up questions (which Kilpatrick wrote is “very useful to reduce fatigue”), a default GPT-4 setting so that paying ChatGPT Plus subscribers don’t have to toggle on the latest/most advanced publicly available OpenAI large language model (LLM) every time they start a new chat, support for multiple file uploads when using the OpenAI Code Interpreter plugin, and more.
Artificial Intelligence
GoStudent raises $95M to pursue VR and AI-driven tutoring 
GoStudent intends to build an AI-driven lesson planner trained on local curriculum that will save tutors an average of 15 minutes per lesson. This would be a tremendous amount of time considering the more than 23,000 tutors on the platform and the amount of time spent with students, and it would enable tutors to spend more time with children rather than planning. The company will also introduce AI-driven content learning to the platform to allow students to study between lessons.
Training & Cert
Protecting data in the era of generative AI: Nightfall AI launches innovative security platform
The challenge is to keep confidential data secure while allowing employees to be more productive using gen AI and ChatGPT at the browser, app and API levels. Cloud data loss prevention (DLP) platform Nightfall AI today announced the first data security platform for gen AI that spans API browser and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application gen AI protection.
Security
Tromzo secures $8M to lead the charge in AI-powered application security posture management
Tromzo’s platform integrates with existing security tools, source code systems, and cloud platforms, and leverages its Intelligence Graph and AI capabilities to prioritize and remediate the most critical vulnerabilities across the software environment.
Security
Uncoder.IO Now Powered by AI: An Ultimate IDE for Detection Engineering
SOC Prime, the world’s largest and most advanced platform for collective cyber defense, announces the upgrade of its Uncoder.IO project to Uncoder AI, an integrated development environment (IDE) for Detection Engineering, which converts generic Sigma rules along with tactical threat intelligence IOC collections into 64 SIEM, EDR, XDR, and Data Lake query formats.
Security
Datadog launches AI helper Bits and new model monitoring solution
Accessible via chat within the company platform, Bits learns from customers’ data — covering everything from logs, metrics, traces and real-user transactions to sources of institutional knowledge like Confluence pages, internal documentation or Slack conversations — and uses that information to quickly provide answers about issues while troubleshooting or remediation steps in conversational.
Data & Analytics
Tech giants make security workforce and education commitments
The initiative is designed to address the immediate and long-term demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals, with hundreds of thousands of cyber job vacancies nationwide. The strategy will supplement ongoing national security efforts including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Tech Jobs
Google can now alert you when your private contact info appears online
Google is making it a lot easier to find and remove your contact information from its search results. The company will now send out notifications when it finds your address, phone number, or email on the web, allowing you to review and request the removal of that information from Search.
Data Privacy
Fortinet bolsters SD-WAN services, security with new software, next-generation firewalls
The Underlay Performance Monitoring Service for SD-WAN utilizes the vendor’s core central management system FortiManager and FortiGuard’s database of hundreds of popular SaaS and cloud implementations, to offer visibility into the performance of the underlay network.  The underlay network is typically made up if the physical network infrastructure supporting traffic between distributed cloud or remote office resources.
Network Management
Microsoft solidifies telecom aspirations, launches Azure Operator Nexus 5G cloud platform
It provides operators with a pre-validated telecom platform that can run from the cloud to the edge and allows operators to select where to run their network functions in support of their 5G or 4G LTE network. The cloud is Microsoft’s Azure public cloud, with the edge being an operator’s on-premises location housing validated server hardware.
Cloud
Boomerang brings in-email meeting scheduler to enterprise users
“This is our patented live image technology. The reason it feels like this is suddenly possible is because nobody has done it before. It’s not an HTML component in the email. We are using a combination of an image map and real-time dynamic image generation that works with our server-side to live update from users’ calendars without leaving the email."
Automation & Productivity
Kinetic Business Launches All-In-One Security Solution to Protect Businesses from Cyberthreats
Kinetic MDR provides a proactive approach to cybersecurity by continuously monitoring and analyzing network activity, detecting and responding to potential threats, and providing remediation strategies.It takes the burden of security management off a business by integrating a firewall, intrusion prevention, and continuous monitoring.This offers the reporting and compliance posture businesses need.
Security
WiMi Developed a Cloud-Based Optimization System for Highly Reliable Graphics Rendering Engines
WiMi’s cloud-based highly reliable graphics rendering engine optimization system contains several key technology modules. The cloud-distributed graphics processing system, intelligent optimization algorithms based on big data, client-side graphics processing software, and security and stability assurance modules together constitute the infrastructure of the system
Automation & Productivity
Endor Labs raises $70M to transform application security by securing open-source components 
Because more than 90% of the code used to build modern applications is derived from open-source software, Endor Labs decided it was best to build the foundation of its platform on OSS governance. Its focus is on helping teams choose and maintain secure, high-quality open-source software, and by doing so it says it can reduce the vulnerability noise by around 80%.
Security
Torq Hyperautomation Platform Transforms SecOps With Torq Socrates, the Generative AI Agent Designed to Close 90% of Tier-1 Tickets Autonomously
Torq announced a powerful evolution of the Torq security Hyperautomation platform: Torq Socrates, cybersecurity’s first Tier-1 analysis AI Agent. Torq Socrates is designed to transform security operations by using AI to hyperautomate key security operations activities, including alert triage, contextual data enrichment, and incident investigation, escalation, and response
IT Management
IBM carbon calculator uses AI to optimize cloud workloads
The major hyperscale cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft, share a history of offering similar cloud emissions calculator tools. According to Gartner analyst Ed Anderson, IBM’s cloud carbon calculator stands out for its use of machine learning (ML) and advanced algorithms like linear regression to reveal emissions hotspots or anomalies based on patterns and trends.
Cloud
Google updates experimental Search Generative Experience
SGE is a version of the company’s search engine that adds a new panel to query results pages. The panel appears above search results and contains AI-generated text. Today’s updates include more images and videos to go with its explanations, plus a reduction in the time it takes to generate overviews of whatever topics users are searching for.
Automation & Productivity
Adaptiv adds zero trust to SD-WAN, aims for SASE product
There is no shortage of SD-WAN vendors in the marketplace, with big names like Cisco, VMware and Palo Alto Networks, among others. Adaptiv Networks is targeting a specific segment of the market, aiming to help serve the needs of small and medium-sized businesses that have limited or no security and networking skills.
Network Management
MemVerge and SK hynix Accelerate Memory Pooling and Sharing Software Development with CXL Flight Simulator
 “CXL is here. A variety of memory expansion cards, memory pooling and switch products are already available in limited quantities, but not all software developers have access to them. We are happy to contribute to the community and enable software developers to tap into the massive CXL market opportunity without delay.”
Automation & Productivity
Rabbet Introduces First Generative AI Feature for Construction Finance
Rabbet, the leading provider of construction finance software, launched its cutting-edge generative AI feature, Rabbet Vantage. Applying Rabbet’s conversational query experience to the wealth of construction finance data tracked on Rabbet transforms how commercial real estate owners, lenders, and servicers interact with financial data, ushering in a new era of efficiency and insights.
Automation & Productivity
Itseez3D launches Avatar SDK Deep Fake Detector to bolster user identity protection
The platform empowers facial verification systems and digital identity management platforms with tools to combat the escalating number of fraudulent attempts. By leveraging machine learning (ML) algorithms, the platform can analyze facial features, distinguishing between genuine photos and synthetic 3D avatars.
Security
Salesforce debuts Sales Elevate, bringing its cloud into Slack
The offering, which goes into general availability from today, will come at an additional cost of $60 per user per month – over Slack’s regular paid plans – and save executives from going back to Sales Cloud for basic day-to-day tasks such as updating their pipelines and adding deal values.
Automation & Productivity
Smarter Security for Students and Staff Using AI
IntelliSee AI Risk Mitigation Platform features active monitoring – a reliable, proactive solution that overlays and continuously scans live surveillance camera feeds for threats.“IntelliSee covers multiple risks for one flat rate, detecting threats from drawn guns to trespassers.This deep-learning AI evolves ongoing as it protects students, staff, and property,”
Security
New NodeStealer Variant Targeting Facebook Business Accounts and Crypto Wallets 
NodeStealer was first exposed by Meta in May 2023, describing it as a stealer capable of harvesting cookies and passwords from web browsers to compromise Facebook, Gmail, and Outlook accounts. While the prior samples were written in JavaScript, the latest versions are coded in Python.
Security
seoClarity Ushers in a New Era With the Launch of ChatGPT-Powered Assistant for SEO
Its superpower lies in its ability to leverage any LLM, allowing an ease of development for future rollouts that allow clients to choose the most suitable one for each task, increasing speed and efficiency in enterprise SEO.
Automation & Productivity
Suki’s Unparalleled Flexibility Expands With The Launch of Mac App
Suki Dictate on Mac expands the use of Suki’s proprietary technology to serve clinicians everywhere and makes Suki the only voice assistant that supports all platforms including iOS, Android, web, Windows, and now Mac.
Automation & Productivity
HitPaw Launches Cutting-Edge Photo Enhancer v2.5.0, Ushering in a New Era of Image Enhancement
HitPaw Photo Enhancer now allows users to export photos with adjustable DPI settings, ranging from 72 to 300.This customizable feature ensures each image is tailored to its intended purpose, guaranteeing impeccable results for web usage or high-quality prints.
Automation & Productivity
Akamai’s new API Security solution seeks to combat rising cyberthreats 
Akamai argues that API security has become a critical concern for organizations as API attacks continue to grow, with a report from Akamai in April finding that API attacks increased by 137% in 2022. Once a WAAP product has authorized an API, security teams have no visibility into its use within the organization. Malicious actors are said to be aware of this blind spot and have shifted to abusing the vast API attack surface.
Security
CoreWeave came ‘out of nowhere.’ Now it’s poised to make billions off AI with its GPU cloud
CoreWeave was founded in 2017 by three commodities traders who turned their cryptocurrency mining hobby into an Ethereum mining company, using GPUs to verify blockchain transactions — doing business out of a New Jersey data center. By 2019, the founders had pivoted — fortuitously, in hindsight — to building a specialized cloud infrastructure spanning seven facilities that offered GPU acceleration at scale.
Cloud
GoDaddy Powered-AI Helps Developers Grow Their Business and Build WordPress Sites
The new GoDaddy Managed WordPress brings AI into site building and managing customer relationships. By answering a few simple questions, users can have the first draft of a starter site completely built, with images included. And when it comes to working with customers, The Hub by GoDaddy Pro uses AI as a virtual assistant.
Automation & Productivity
Revolutionizing the 3D Printing Landscape: Creality Cloud’s Advanced Features and Thriving Community Lead the Way
In June 2023, Creality Cloud launched the Designer Partnership Program to take great support for 3D designers, offering commission-free sales, over $900 incentive cash rewards, and complimentary 30-day free membership, unlocking premium features for enhanced productivity
Automation & Productivity
Cisco buys Internet BGP monitoring firm CodeBGP
Privately held Code BGP will slide into Cisco’s ThousandEyes network intelligence product portfolio and bring a cloud-based platform that among other features,  maintains an inventory of IP address prefixes, peerings and outbound policies of an organization via configured sources, like BGP feeds. BGP tells Internet traffic what route to take, and the BGP best-path selection algorithm determines the optimal routes to use for traffic forwarding.
Network Management
VAST Data launches unified data platform for the age of AI
“Encapsulating the ability to create and catalog understanding from natural data on a global scale, we’re consolidating entire IT infrastructure categories to enable the next era of large-scale data computation,”
Data Management
Cisco’s new XDR features strengthen cyber resilience against ransomware 
Cisco announced its XDR service in April, introducing deep telemetry and visibility across network and endpoints. The addition of ransomware protection is centered on the ability to reduce the time between the beginning of a ransomware outbreak and the snapshotting of essential business information to nearly zero. The upgrade aligns with Cisco’s broader vision for a unified, artificial intelligence-driven, cross-domain security platform.
Security
Neon lands $46M for its serverless Postgres database management system 
Neon is positioned as a serverless open-source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres. It separates storage from computing and substitutes the PostgreSQL storage layer by redistributing data across a cluster of nodes. This makes storage capacity virtually unlimited and allows users to save money by assigning little-used storage to low-cost tiers.
Data Management
MIT CSAIL unveils PhotoGuard, an AI defense against unauthorized image manipulation
In the research paper “Raising the Cost of Malicious AI-Powered Image Editing,” the researchers claim that PhotoGuard can detect imperceptible “perturbations” (disturbance or irregularity) in pixel values, which are invisible to the human eye but detectable by computer models.
Data Privacy
Yext Debuts AI-Driven Conversational Chat and Content Management in Its Summer ’23 Release
Yext Chat: Removes the technical and expertise barriers for companies to create experiences using conversational, natural language. Unlike existing chatbots, it is designed so any authorized user can design experiences or even create business processes by interacting with the chatbot as though they were giving informal guidance to a colleague
Automation & Productivity
Abbey Labs secures $5.25M for identity and access management innovation 
Employees requesting proper access to do their jobs battle inefficient, insecure and costly layers of processes that, while aiming to make companies secure and compliant, also create bottlenecks and take away valuable work time.
Automation & Productivity
Akkio raises $15M to advance no-code AI platform for businesses
AI is the need of the hour today, but taking advantage of its capabilities is difficult owing to the engineering complexities involved. Akkio tackles this challenge by providing enterprises with no-code tools to quickly build and deploy AI for tasks like churn reduction, attrition prediction, fraud detection and sales funnel optimization.
Automation & Productivity
Menlo Security debuts new tools for blocking advanced browser-based threats 
To address that challenge, Menlo Security has equipped HEAT Shield with artificial intelligence features. Those AI features can scan the code elements of the websites that a worker visits to find malware. Moreover, the service uses computer vision to detect visual clues that may suggest a website is malicious.
Security
Monte Carlo debuts new tool for monitoring data reliability 
“They can basically go into the tool, define what constitutes the data product — what are the objects that are actually the data product, whether it’s tables or BI reports or models — and understand not just what’s going on with those specific objects but what’s going on with everything that’s upstream of them,”
Data Management
Fiverr launches Business Solutions and Neo AI matching algorithm
Earlier this year, VentureBeat reported how the company experienced a 1,400% increase in searches for professionals with AI-related skills on its marketplace. And today, Fiverr is announcing the launch of two new services — Fiverr Business Solutions and Fiverr Neo, both of which it hopes will leverage the sudden boom of interest in AI to further cement Fiverr’s place as the first stop when businesses need help with their creative projects.Automation & Productivity
Dell Technologies Expands AI Offerings to Accelerate Secure Generative AI Initiatives
New Dell Generative AI Solutions, expanding upon May’s Project Helix announcement, span IT infrastructure, PCs and professional services to simplify the adoption of full-stack GenAI with large language models (LLM), meeting organizations wherever they are in their GenAI journey
Artificial Intelligence
AuditBoard Unveils New IT Risk Management Solution
AuditBoard ITRM enables effective collaboration between IT security, and other functions in the business to accelerate the identification and classification of IT systems, perform business impact assessments, and remediate identified issues. The solution also enables CISOs to more effectively report on IT risk in financial terms to the CFO and the board, helping to drive business alignment and unlock investments.
IT Management
Putting Generative AI to Work: Smartsheet Announces New AI Features that Unlock the Power of the Smartsheet Platform
By connecting large language models (LLMs) to customers’ private business data, Smartsheet can securely deliver insights and data visualizations and help build project and portfolio management solutions in response to simple natural language questions.
Automation & Productivity
Microsoft Azure OpenAI service approved for use on sensitive government systems 
The authorization will allow government departments’ cloud apps to integrate with and adapt models including GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and DALL-E for specific tasks, including content generation, summarization, semantic search, and natural language-to-code translation.
Artificial Intelligence
IntegrateAI Launched by Eduscape
“AI is not the boogeyman, nor a threat to effective teacher practice. The opportunities to drive inquiry and enhance learning across all subject areas is limitless. We must ensure however, that educational leaders recognize the value, remain current with best practices, provide effective professional development, and implement policies that drive classroom adoption while protecting the student.”
EdTech
IBM debuts AI-powered carbon calculator for the cloud
The calculator can be accessed via IBM’s cloud dashboard, where it provides a range of graphs and charts to track total carbon emissions created by a customer’s use of IBM’s cloud, breaking it down on a per-service, per-department and per-location basis.
Cloud
Merkle Unveils Revolutionary Generative AI Technology
With the exponential growth of data and the rising demand for personalized experiences, brands are now faced with the challenge of leveraging their first-party data. Merkle’s GenCX solution solves for this by building large knowledge models (LKMs) and leverages the power of large language models (LLMs) on its clients’ proprietary data assets to drive insights, audiences, creative, and campaign recommendations through an intuitive chat-based interface.
Data & Analytics
Google is training robots the way it trains AI chatbots
The new model trained on web and robotics data, leveraging research advances in large language models like Google’s own Bard and combining it with robotic data (like which joints to move), the company said in a paper. It also understands directions in languages other than English.
Artificial Intelligence
Dynatrace boosts observability platform with generative AI
Dynatrace has incorporated generative AI into its Davis AI engine to let customers more quickly create dashboards, determine the root cause of incidents, and speed mean time to repair.
Automation & Productivity
Identiv Simplifies Cyber-Secure Access Control with Primis
The suite features Primis on-premises access control, Primis Cloud, Primis Mobile, and the EG-2 controller. By transforming traditional physical access control systems into user-friendly, cyber-secure solutions, Primis simplifies security.
Security
Passage Raises $6 Million to Launch AI-Driven Virtual World Builder
"We were able to validate this early on in 2020 when we built experiences for large brands and retail audiences. Back then, producing a 3D experience was a long, expensive process that we managed personally. Now, anyone will be able to create an immersive world using simple drag-and-drop tools in their browser. Through our partnership with Sortium AI, this is even easier, making it possible for everyone to generate beautiful 3D assets and experiences.”
Automation & Productivity
Hackers Abusing Windows Search Feature to Install Remote Access Trojans
The novel attack technique, per Trellix, takes advantage of the "search-ms:" URI protocol handler, which offers the ability for applications and HTML links to launch custom local searches on a device, and the "search:" application protocol, a mechanism for calling the desktop search application on Windows.
Security
Credo AI Introduces AI Registry, The Easiest Way To Get Started With AI Governance
Credo AI’s AI Registry also provides built-in policy intelligence that automatically surfaces information about potential risks of AI systems based on where and how they are being used. Customers can use AI Registry to identify high risk AI use cases that need governance and to prioritize AI initiatives based on risk-to-revenue potential.
Artificial Intelligence
Switchboard, led by Google BigQuery veterans, announces $7M series A funding for data product platform
Data products, a concept popularized by the “data mesh” approach to business domain-oriented data and analytics, are applications, APIs, data feeds or simple datasets that are owned, supported and internally marketed by enterprise business units, and made available to other such groups. Developing data products has, for the most part, required the work of data engineers and analytics specialists, a fact that has stymied the decentralized approach to data-driven business that the data mesh paradigm seeks to enable.
Data Management
Capgemini Launches New Set of Generative AI Offerings
“Custom generative AI for Enterprise” enables enterprises who have sensitive data to have custom generative AI assistants fine-tuned with their key proprietary data, in order to get maximum business value impact. The Group has designed a platform to combine the power of pre-trained open large foundation models (LFMs) with enterprise proprietary data to fine-tune LFMs to the needs of each client.
Automation & Productivity
Box extends AI efforts with Microsoft 365 Copilot integration
Box is now growing its AI reach with a plugin that enables organizations to use Microsoft 365 Copilot to Box content. Microsoft 365 Copilot is also a gen AI technology that allows Microsoft 365 users across Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Teams to create and query content.
Content Management
SentinelOne unveils cloud data security products for Amazon S3, NetApp
The new threat detection for NetApp and Amazon S3 products can automatically scan every file added to these two storage platforms for file-borne and zero-day malware, detecting and quarantining malicious files in real time.
Security
OpenAI can’t detect AI-generated content after all; shut down its AI Classifier tool due to low accuracy rate
“As of July 20, 2023, the AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy. We are working to incorporate feedback and are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text, and have made a commitment to develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated,
Artificial Intelligence
Government services provider Maximus hit by MOVEit attack
After ordering an investigation of the incident, Maximus found data belonging to at least 8 million to 11 million individuals had been affected. The data stolen included personal information, including Social Security numbers, protected health information and personally identifiable information.
Privacy & Security
Ansys supplements customer support with generative AI agent 
Ansys isn’t a newcomer to AI. It uses machine learning to improve turbulence models in computational fluid dynamics, predict computational spending and in process integration and design optimization software for the construction of reduced order models.
Automation & Productivity
MemVerge puts lowering carbon emissions in AWS cloud app on the Spot
Its Memory Machine Cloud software enables users to submit jobs to the AWS cloud in a serverless way and have them run in EC2 Spot instances, with dynamically modified sizes as needed to economize on cloud resources. The Memory Machine Cloud Essentials edition is free and includes a WaveWatcher calculator to track cloud app carbon emissions of cloud apps so organizations can right size for a lower carbon footprint.
Cloud
Beyond Work raises $2.5M to make work more ‘human’ with LLMs
“In most cases, people are not using the software, it is using them to further the purposes of others. Click a button here, change a bit of data there … and if you’re lucky it will trigger something for someone you don’t know or see — and then, maybe, just maybe, you can get on with your real work
Automation & Productivity
Fermyon brings NoOps database to WebAssembly; AI capabilities on horizon
But rather than just using the open-source SQLite technology, Fermyon has partnered with software firm Turso, which manages a SQLite-compatible distributed database platform. With this integration, Fermyon can automatically provision a database for developers, allowing them to start writing SQL queries for data and applications almost immediately.
DevOps
Stack Overflow jumps into the generative AI world with Overflow AI
Overload AI is not a single product, rather, it is a series of initiatives including updated AI search on both the public and enterprise platforms. For enterprise, there is also an Overflow AI Visual Studio code extension as well as a Slack integration.
Automation & Productivity
AWS expands Bedrock with new AI models and complex task automation 
Amazon Bedrock is the company’s fully managed service that provides customers with foundational generative AI models. Customers can use the service to train and fine-tune their models with their own data on Amazon’s high-performance infrastructure in a secure environment all without the need to manage anything.
Automation & Productivity
Egnyte adds generative AI smarts to streamline content collaboration
The California-based company said it is using private instances of various AI models to provide users with summarization, transcription and search capabilities across multiple file types. The move will enable enterprises to find and synthesize information buried in a massive trove of documents and media files much more quickly than ever before.
Content Management
The banking trojan malware Qakbot is surging again. Here’s what it means for defenders 
Back in January, Microsoft disabled Office macros by default — and it was certainly about time, since default malware-laced macros have been a persistent thorn in security managers’ sides for years. So Qakbot switched over to using infected OneNote files to gain a toehold in users’ personal computers. This choice proved effective cover, since users are familiar with the cloud repository and many use it for benign purposes
Security
ServiceNow partners with Nvidia and Accenture on ‘AI Lighthouse’ for rapid enterprise AI adoption
The three partners each claim to offer a different benefit to customers who adopt AI Lighthouse: the ServiceNow enterprise automation platform and engine, Nvidia’s AI supercomputing and software and Accenture’s consulting and deployment services.
Automation & Productivity
Major generative AI players join to create the Frontier Model Forum
Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic will be the founding members of the Frontier Model Forum, an umbrella group for the generative AI industry. The group plans to focus on safety research, as well as the identification of best practices, public policy, and use cases for the rapidly advancing technology that can benefit society as a whole.
Artificial Intelligence
Startup UniFabriX uses CXL memory technology to boost rack density
UniFabriX is pitching its Smart Memory Node technology as an alternative to socket-connected DRAM, which restricts memory capacity and bandwidth in CPUs. UniFabriX's technology is based on CXL (Compute Express Link), an industry-supported interconnect for processors, memory expansion, and accelerators.
Automation & Productivity
Stability AI levels up image generation with new Stable Diffusion base model for better image composition
Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) 1.0 is the new, leading-edge flagship text-to-image generation model from Stability AI. The release comes as Stability AI aims to level up its capabilities and open the model in the face of competition from rivals like Midjourney and Adobe, which recently entered the space with its Firefly service.
Automation & Productivity
AWS debuts new AI-powered data management and analysis tools 
Users can interact with Entity Resolution through a visual interface. According to AWS, creating a software workflow that finds related records and links them takes a few clicks. Users can manually configure record linking workflows or use a preconfigured AI model provided by AWS to automate the process.
Data Management
Protect AI raises $35M to expand its AI and machine learning security platform
“Machine learning models and AI applications are typically built using an assortment of open-source libraries, foundational models and third-party datasets. AI Radar creates an immutable record to track all these components used in an ML model or AI application in the form of a ‘machine learning bill of materials (MLBOM),’”
Security
CNAPP tool aims to address software engineering risks
The future of cloud application security requires a focus on hardening CI/CD systems and processes, he said, as attackers increasingly target engineering workstations to gain access to sensitive information. Organizations should prioritize the building of cloud AppSec workflows and conduct analyses against realistic attack scenarios, he advised.
Security
GigaIO introduces single-node AI supercomputer
What makes GigaIO's device – called SuperNODE – notable is that it offers a choice of GPUs: up to 32 AMD Instinct MI210 GPUs or 24 NVIDIA A100s, plus up to 1PB storage to a single off-the-shelf server.
Automation & Productivity
Palo Alto Networks introduces CI/CD Security to Prisma Cloud
CI/CD Security by Prisma Cloud offers graph-based CI/CD security that has been designed to provide better visibility in engineering ecosystems. The service offers protection from the Open Worldwide Application Security Project Top 10 CI/CD risks, pipeline posture management and attack path analysis via the Cloud Application Graph.
Security
New AI Tool 'FraudGPT' Emerges, Tailored for Sophisticated Attacks
The author also states that the tool could be used to write malicious code, create undetectable malware, find leaks and vulnerabilities, and that there have been more than 3,000 confirmed sales and reviews. The exact large language model (LLM) used to develop the system is currently not known.
Privacy & Security
The excellent Arc browser is now available for anyone to download
We’ve covered Arc a lot in recent months, both because it’s a good browser and because it’s a big new idea about how you use the internet. The Browser Company’s ultimate plan is to build “the operating system for the internet.” Arc isn’t just a place to see webpages; it has tools for taking notes, making visual and collaborative easels with others, redesigning webpages to your liking, and more.
Automation & Productivity
OpenAI’s Sam Altman launches Worldcoin, an iris-scanning crypto project to ‘verify’ every human online
To acquire a World ID, users undergo an in-person iris scan using the Worldcoin ‘orb’ – a unique silver ball, roughly the size of a bowling ball. The orb’s iris scan performs a verification process to ensure that the individual is indeed a real human, and upon successful confirmation, a World ID is generated for them.
Privacy & Security
Network giants unite to fight security risks
Right now, it’s way too easy for malicious cyber actors – including nation states and criminal groups – to find open vulnerabilities, to run remote code execution, and to find end-of-life products that are no longer being maintained,
Security
TikTok announces new text and e-commerce features amid social media battle to become meta 
As Twitter tries to become the everything app, TikTok becomes Twitter, while Meta-owned Instagram also becomes Twitter through its fairly new Threads app. Threads has reportedly seen a huge drop in user numbers just recently after a promising start to its existence. It’s not the only company struggling to outdo Twitter in a battle that has become rather political. But it’s quite uncertain many of these companies will succeed in becoming everything apps.
Social Media
Mobilo raises $4.1M to revolutionize business networking and eliminate millions of business cards thrown away every year
Mobilo has come up with ways to save trees and also lower emissions while saving capital spent on printing. The company aims to stop the endless, unnecessary cycle of printing and discarding business cards through smart business cards that only need to be tapped on the phone once for instant contact details to be shared.
Automation & Productivity
New OpenSSH Vulnerability Exposes Linux Systems to Remote Command Injection
Successful exploitation requires the presence of certain libraries on the victim system and that the SSH authentication agent is forwarded to an attacker-controlled system. SSH agent is a background program that maintains users' keys in memory and facilitates remote logins to a server without having to enter their passphrase again.
Security
AWS offers new generative AI training courses targeting beginners and experts 
For nontechnical users, AWS has created a new introductory coding course for Amazon CodeWhisperer, a code-generating companion that provides generative AI-powered suggestions and recommendations. The initial course is all about discovering the capabilities of Amazon CodeWhisperer and setting it up, while the AWS Jam Journey course is a more interactive, hands-on module for users to gain practical experience.
Training & Certs
New monday.com data infrastructure to speed platform performance
The newly released foundational model of mondayDB allows boards and other items to load five times faster, while also offering customers new use cases and custom workflows, as well as extended API and data manipulation capabilities, the company said.
Automation & Productivity
OpenAI launches Android version of its ChatGPT app 
Both the iOS and Android versions of ChatGPT are available at no charge. Consumers can, however, use the apps with a paid ChatGPT Plus subscription. The subscription is priced at $20 per month and offers faster chatbot response times along with priority access to updates.
ChatGPT
Niantic 8th Wall introduces web AR features to track hands, fingers and wrists 
8th Wall has created its own specialized hand model that can track the entire hand, including the palm and the wrist, allowing developers to create apps for fine-tuning attachment points for virtual objects that can rest on a user’s hand. The model includes up to 36 attachment points stretching across the fingers, knuckles, wrist and palm.
Emerging Tech
Talon Cyber Security Delivers Most Complete Enterprise Browser Security Portfolio with the Launch of the Talon Extension
With the launch of the Talon Extension, Talon delivers the most comprehensive browser security coverage with unified policy management for hybrid deployments. The company’s portfolio empowers customers with a single view into browser activity across any environment, powered by the Talon Enterprise Browser, Talon Extension and Talon Mobile.
Security
ReBid Launches FREE GPT-Based AI Assistant for Advertisers to Scale Campaigns Across Multiple Platforms
This new AI assistant empowers advertisers to make data-driven decisions with ease, optimizing campaigns, and improving ROI across platforms such as Google & Meta. Built on the latest GPT technology, the AI assistant can understand natural language and provide highly accurate insights based on past campaign data.
Data & Analytics
Cohere releases Coral, AI assistant designed for enterprise business use
Finally, Coral offers privacy and security by storing sensitive data in a secure data environment that is cloud-agnostic. Enterprises can use major cloud providers like Oracle, Amazon and Google, deploy in a virtual private cloud, or use on-premises.
Automation & Productivity
Thales acquires cybersecurity provider Imperva for $3.6B 
One of Imperva’s main focus areas is application security. It sells a firewall that companies use to block malicious network traffic from reaching their applications. Imperva also offers tools that filter malicious requests sent to websites, application programming interfaces and serverless workloads.
Security
New OpenText Cloud Editions release harnesses AI and analytics capabilities 
OpenText Magellan Data Discovery and BI Reporting, another core component of OpenText’s Cloud Editions, is now available on the public cloud. The release provides a user-friendly interface for advanced data discovery and visualization powered by the analytical capabilities of OpenText Vertica.
Data & Analytics
Dynatrace combines predictive and causal insights with generative AI to redefine observability 
It’s a causation engine that provides not just data, but also answers questions about the performance of software applications, the infrastructure they sit on, and the end-user experience. It helps organizations to modernize and automate enterprise cloud operations, push out software updates more frequently, and deliver optimal user experiences for their employees and customers.
Data & Analytics
Einblick Launches Deep AI Integration, Empowering Users to Go from Prompts to Multimodal Data Workflows
Einblick today released Einblick Prompt, bringing the power of OpenAI and ChatGPT straight into their canvas-based data notebooks. Prompt is an AI agent that reasons and solves users’ natural language prompts, allowing them to generate and debug code, create charts, and build machine learning models in seconds.
Automation & Productivity
Sysdig Sage brings power of generative AI to cloud security with an LLM controller approach
While declining to name the specific LLMs used by Sage AI, Degioanni explained that his team has built an “LLM controller” which orchestrates requests to different LLMs. The controller also filters and sanitizes data in a way designed to improve accuracy and reduce the risk of any potential AI hallucination.
Artificial Intelligence
Everlaw integrates generative AI features to help legal teams to build their cases 
The AI can also assist legal teams by building evidence-based legal texts in the company’s Everlaw Storybuilder trial preparation platform that assists legal teams in crafting case narratives and workflows by organizing documents and doing reviews. By using information from stored documents, the AI can create a rough draft from key evidence with full citations that are prepared for editing and fact-checking.
Automation & Productivity
Managed Service Providers for the Protection of Critical Infrastructure Formed to Advance Small and Medium Enterprise Cybersecurity
MSPs and MSSPs play an essential role in facilitating IT, cybersecurity, and supply chain risk management across critical infrastructure sectors, the federal contracting base, and especially in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB).  Within the DIB, MSPs and MSSPs are commonly responsible for 40% - 70% of the IT and cybersecurity requirements that must be implemented and maintained to satisfy DoD regulations and to ultimately achieve certification at Level 2 under the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program.
Security
Nitel goes global with international network-as-a-service plans
The idea is to provide a more or less out-of-the-box network product that allows small and medium-size companies to hand the vast majority of their connectivity issues off to Nitel, which manages configuration and provisioning.
Network Management
Cloud video surveillance company Solink raises $60M for global expansion 
Features of the platform include solutions for forensic security and real-time active security monitoring, catering to the specific needs of various industries. Clients can use the platform to manage after-hour alarm systems with video verification, monitor unauthorized access control and optimize service speed for patrons. The features are centralized and readily available via a web or mobile app.
Security
Salesforce’s latest AI updates enable sellers to integrate purchase experiences everywhere 
For instance, Reorder Portal is a new integration that helps businesses to grow their revenue faster by providing customers with personalized self-serve reordering opportunities. It leverages the AI-powered Next Best Actions in Sales Cloud and allows sales representatives to identify and target repeat buyers and send automated emails inviting them to reorder past purchases.
Automation & Productivity
LimaCharlie Unveils SecOps Cloud Platform
Enterprise security teams need a hosted environment of communicative protection solutions – rather than siloed collections of tools. A 2022 survey by Gartner, Inc. found that 75% of organizations pursued security vendor consolidation in 2022. However, there is no practical SecOps environment that streamlines the procurement, deployment and integration of security tools.
Security
PurpleCube Unified Data Orchestration Platform to Replace All Legacy Data Integration
PurpleCube, a modern data management software company, announced the industry’s first cloud-native, unified data orchestration platform designed to replace all generations of legacy data integration, preparation, replication, engineering, messaging, and API integration platforms.
Data Management
Verizon seeks out a unique broadband use for its mmWave spectrum
The test beamed a signal using licensed mmWave spectrum in the 37 GHz–39 GHz band between a centralized, rooftop radio site and a radio sitting on a simulated building. That signal was then transmitted through coaxial cable throughout the building to a data processing unit tied to a modem, which then used the building’s existing wiring to transport a broadband signal to end-user routers.
Network Management
FPT Software Launches FezyFlow, A No-code Workflow Platform
FPT Software, a global IT service provider, announces the official launch of its no-code workflow platform, FezyFlow. With a vision to promote a new age of AI-assisted no-code platform, FezyFlow aims to empower enterprises in their digital transformation journey by leveraging their non-IT resources.
Automation & Productivity
Qualtrics Launches XM/os2 The Next Generation of The Qualtrics Platform Fully Enabled With AI
Qualtrics now captures and analyzes more than 3.5 billion conversations and interactions a year—including call center conversations, chat logs, survey responses, social media posts, product reviews and more—creating the largest database of experience profiles in the world.
Artificial Intelligence
Google will start deleting inactive accounts: Gmail, Docs, YouTube at risk
Your dormant Gmail accounts could get wiped later this year if you haven’t logged in for a while—or interacted with any other of Google’s services while logged in. A new update to Google’s policy on inactive personal accounts now puts them on the chopping block after two years, a move that Google says is for better security.
Automation & Productivity
Superblock Raises $8M for “Over Protocol,” a New Layer 1 Blockchain Focusing on Lightweight Full Nodes
Over Protocol is a new layer 1 blockchain based on a protocol named “Ethanos” that only considers active accounts valid, enabling full nodes to discard obsolete data and operate with less storage, thus allowing for reduced storage requirements. With Over, anyone will be able to run a node and become a validator on their PCs at home. Ethanos has been published at EuroSys’21.
Blockchain
Google, Microsoft and Amazon among 7 AI giants making ‘voluntary’ safety pledge
“A voluntary system can work within the scope of ‘common usage,’ but it will only work for organizations that operate legitimately. I am far less concerned with one of the major players having flaws in their publicly available AI tools than I am with a hostile nation or cybercriminal organization building out their own capability and using it against the general public,” Parkin added.
Artificial intelligence
Threads’ daily active user base has reportedly declined by 70%
Sensor Tower also evaluated app engagement as part of its research. According to the company, the average amount of time that Threads users spend in the app plummeted from 19 minutes to four. SimilarWeb Ltd., which provides an analytics platform of the same name, shared similar findings.
Social Media
The end of AI content creation? OpenAI, Google, and others pledge to watermarking AI content for safety, White House says
As part of the collective effort, the seven companies made commitments to implement a system for “watermarking” all types of AI-generated content, including text, images, audio, and videos. This watermarking process will technically embed a marker in the content, allowing users to easily identify instances where AI technology has been utilized.
Artificial Intelligence
Vectice Introduces Auto-Documentation Solution for ML Projects & Governance to Simplify Compliance with EU AI Act
Vectice, a leader in ML Auto-Documentation and Governance, has announced the release of its latest product: Auto-documentation for ML projects & their governance. This novel solution arrives at a critical juncture as the EU AI Act comes into effect, imposing fines that are a staggering 50% higher than those under GDPR for non-compliance with full model lifecycle documentation requirements.
Data Governance
Google is testing new AI tool that can write news articles
One of the three individuals familiar with the product told the Times that Google believed that its new product could function as a personalized assistant for journalists. The idea was to automate certain tasks, thus giving journalists more time for other important aspects of their work. The company viewed this technology as a responsible solution that could guide the publishing industry away from the potential pitfalls of generative artificial intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence
Lenovo all-flash arrays aimed at optimizing AI workloads
Lenovo’s ThinkSystem DG enterprise storage arrays use all-flash storage and quad-level cell (QLC) architecture, the densest flash storage available. They’re capable of up to six times faster performance and up to 50% less cost compared to HDD arrays, Lenovo asserts.
Data Storage
Cosmic Wire raises $30M to expand cross-chain Web3 platform
Finck stated that his company’s philosophy contrasts sharply with other platforms, as it does not involve trading access to users for ownership. Instead, the company embraces a decentralized approach through cross-chain technology, ensuring interoperability and security “in a true zero-trust environment with no backdoor access, and transparent as all data usage is containerized and time-stamped on the chain.
Web3
Teleport Introduces Teleport Assist: An AI Chat Interface for Fast Infrastructure Troubleshooting
Beginning with SSH and bash, DevOps teams can use Teleport Assist to verbally chat with their cloud environments. Specifically, engineers can ask questions and give instructions in English to massive fleets of servers. In future versions, all other cloud resources, such as SQL databases and Kubernetes clusters, will be added to Teleport Assist.
IT Management
Cisco, Arista, HPE, Intel lead consortium to supersize Ethernet for AI infrastructures
“It is time to begin with a clean slate to build a modern transport protocol supporting RDMA for emerging applications,” Ullal wrote. “The [consortium’s] UET (Ultra Ethernet Transport) protocol will incorporate the advantages of Ethernet/IP while addressing AI network scale for applications, endpoints and processes, and maintaining the goal of open standards and multi-vendor interoperability.”
Network Management
Solidigm Introduces the World’s Highest Capacity PCIe SSD for Massive Data Storage from Core to Edge
Solidigm, a leading global provider of innovative NAND flash memory solutions, is proud to announce another industry-first quad-level cell (QLC) solid-state storage drive (SSD) for the data center — the Solidigm D5-P5336. Offered in capacities from 7.68TB to 61.44TB, the Solidigm D5-P5336 makes it possible to store up to 6X more data in the same space compared to an all hard disk drive (HDD) array.
Data Storage
Microsoft intros user content backup for M365
Numerous data protection suppliers offer user data protection services for SaaS apps like M365 and Salesforce because SaaS providers primarily protect their infrastructure rather than user content. Microsoft is enhancing its approach by providing user content protection for SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and Exchange Online services. Furthermore, Microsoft will offer an archival storage tier for SharePoint at a lower cost than standard SharePoint storage to address rising storage costs.
Data Management
Soracom Adds Generative AI Capability to IoT Connectivity
These new services, named Soracom Query, Soracom Relay, and Soracom Harvest Data Intelligence, can work together or separately to analyze IoT device data on the fly or connect devices to the powerful AI/ML capabilities now available through leading hyperscale platforms.
Data & Analytics
Azure MANA smartNIC boosts network speed
“Azure Boost is an innovative system that offloads virtualization processes, including networking, storage, and host management traditionally performed by the hypervisor and host OS, onto purpose-built hardware and software.”
Network Management
The Industry’s First Data Masking and Tokenization SaaS Solution Gains Momentum with Adoption Across Fortune 500 and Global 2000 Customers
It allows existing SaaS key management customers to embrace data masking and tokenization while allowing new customers to start off with that as a standalone use-case. The benefits from the platform approach deliver greater business agility without compromising on security.
Data & Analytics
GitHub announces public beta of Copilot Chat IDE integration
According to GitHub, developers will be able to effortlessly tackle complex tasks through simple prompts using Copilot Chat. The company asserts that this will empower every development team member, regardless of experience level, to build complete applications or debug extensive codebases in minutes rather than days.
Automation & Productivity
200,000+ OpenAI credentials found for sale on the dark web
Pointner warned that generative AI chatbots also bring an additional concern. “With these credentials, fraudsters can gain access to all types of information users have inputted into the chatbot, such as content from their previous conversations and use it to create hypercustomized phishing scams to increase their credibility and effectiveness,”
Security
Compute.ai aims to power up supercloud by going beyond the data warehouse
“Our view of the semantic layer is simply metadata that connects the different data silos so that you can put it all together. The use case for that would be … the ephemeral data that you don’t have time to put into a data warehouse, you don’t have time to run the analytics and the statistics on that, because if you take the time to actually put it into that data warehouse it’s gone.”
Data & Analytics
ChatGPT can now remember how users want it to behave
Some examples of instruction prompts might be “Write the answer in less than 1,000 words” or “Keep the tone formal throughout,” and they enable users to direct the kinds of responses ChatGPT will provide them with. A math teacher using ChatGPT can instruct it to create a lesson plan bearing in mind his students are just six years old, or a developer might want to specify the programming language used when asking it to create snippets of code.
Automation & Productivity
Dell acquires venture-backed AIOps startup Moogsoft 
The platform works by collecting diagnostics data from a company’s infrastructure and analyzing that data to find technical issues. Moogsoft gathers information about events such as server outages. It also collects metrics, data points that usually don’t describe specific events but rather trends such as a gradual decrease in application performance.
Data & Analytics
6G Breakthrough: NTT Achieves 300 GHz Band High-Speed Data Transmission with Beamforming
The researchers succeeded in achieving the world’s first wireless data transmission via beamforming in the 300 GHz band, which is expected to be utilized in the realization of sixth-generation (6G) communications.
Network Management
FedML raises $11.5M to foster collaborative AI model training at the edge 
The startup explains that many businesses are interested in training and fine-tuning AI models on their own proprietary datasets, so they can better perform tasks around customer service, product design and business automation. But it’s difficult for them to use this data, which is often regulated or siloed, in a safe way with existing, cloud-based AI training systems.
Artificial Intelligence
EnGenius to release Wi-Fi 7 router for the enterprise
The key upgrades in Wi-Fi 7 include wider channels (up to 320MHz), 4K quadrature amplitude modulation rather than 1K, and muiltilink operation, which uses multiple radio bands at the same time to serve one connection. All that adds up to a substantially increased theoretical throughput peak, at 46Gbps.
Network Management
Unstructured raises $25M for large language model data processing expansion 
The company provides its users with three starting points: an open-source Python library, containers and a cloud-hosted application programming interface. The API can process more than 20 natural language file types from raw to LLM-ready data and enterprise-grade data connectors.
DevOps
DataStax Delivers a Production-ready, Massively Scalable, HIPAA-enabled, PCI Compliant Vector Database to Fuel Enterprise-wide Generative AI Applications
DataStax today announced the general availability (GA) of its vector search capability in Astra DB – the popular database-as-a-service (DBaaS) built on the open source Apache Cassandra database – delivering orders of magnitude more data and lower latency than other leading databases for building game-changing generative AI applications.
Data & Analytics
Nasuni says it can restore millions of files hit by ransomware in seconds 
Noting that distributed file shares create a greater vulnerability to and longer restore times from ransomware attacks, Nasuni said its add-on ransomware protection can recover millions of files in seconds as well as quickly detect and stop attacks in progress. Targeted restore capabilities provide precise file restoration in seconds
Data Management
Wallaroo.AI and Ampere Computing Collaborate to Bring Energy-Efficient, Low-Cost ML Inferencing to the Cloud
Benchmarks have shown as much as a 6x improvement over containerized x86 solutions on certain models like the open source ResNet-50 model. Tests were run using an optimized version of the Wallaroo Enterprise Edition on Dpsv5-series Azure virtual machines using Arm64 Azure virtual machines using Ampere Altra 64-bit processors; however, the optimized solution will also be available for other cloud platforms.
Cloud
Fortinet unveils data center firewalls with AI support
The 387Gbps 3200F series and 164Gbps 900G series feature support for the vendor’s AI-Powered Security Services, which blend AI and machine-learning technologies to make customers aware of cyber threats and act on protecting resources much more quickly,
Security
Prospective Raises $6M Seed to Access, Analyze and Visualize Large Datasets in Real Time
Prospective is tailored to handle tasks that demand high-performance, precision and granularity. By streamlining the data retrieval and operationalization processes, Prospective empowers builders, consumers, and analysts to derive actionable insights that were previously inaccessible
Data & Analytics
Privacera Unveils Governed Data Stewardship Solution to Power Data Democratization and Federate Data Governance
This innovative offering transforms how IT organizations distribute data ownership and stewardship into lines of business to speed up self-service data sharing and access governance. By eliminating a significant IT bottleneck, Privacera reduces IT complexity and cost, reduces the volume of service desk tickets, increases business agility, and keeps data safe and well-regulated.
Data Management
Microsoft unveils Copilot pricing, adds new generative AI capabilities
At its annual Inspire event for resellers Tuesday, Microsoft offered new details on how it is rolling out generative AI capabilities across its product line, announcing that Copilot will be available to customers for $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers.
Automation & Productivity
Tractable raises $65 million in funding led by SoftBank to assess insurance claims using AI
“Tractable’s AI has helped millions recover faster from accidents and natural disasters. In SoftBank we have a partner who understands the full application set of our technology at a granular level, combined deep networks within the insurtech, automotive and property sectors"
Automation & Productivity
Pay up! Thousands of authors tell AI leaders they want to be paid when their work is used 
The authors don’t mince their words, calling the use of their work an “inherent injustice” as the companies’ AI systems scrape their words without “consent, credit, or compensation.” The letter states that generative AI tools owe their “existence to our writings,” which is actually only partially true given that large language models, or LLMs, work on myriad data sets. Just recently, Reddit Inc., one of the world’s busiest forums, also expressed its discontent with data being scraped from its platform for free.
Artificial Intelligence
Threads user exodus: Meta’s so-called ‘Twitter killer’ app’s user engagement plunges just a week after red-hot debut
Specifically, on Tuesday and Wednesday, the platform experienced a decrease of approximately 20% in daily active users compared to Saturday. Additionally, the average time spent by users on the app plummeted by 50%, dropping from 20 minutes to just 10 minutes. These figures indicate a significant pullback in user activity and demonstrate a decline in the app’s overall appeal.
Social Media
White House announces cybersecurity certification program for connected devices
More than two dozen organizations have already signed up for the White House’s new IoT security initiative, which is known as the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark program. The participants include tech giants such as Amazon.com Inc., Google LLC and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. Multiple chipmakers, among them Qualcomm Inc., are taking part as well along with several major electronics retailers and universities.
Security
SAP invests directly in three AI startups: Cohere, Anthropic and Aleph Alpha
As for why SAP chose these three gen AI startups to invest in over any others: “All three companies – Aleph Alpha (Germany), Anthropic (U.S.) and Cohere (Canada) are each recognized for industry leadership, innovation, and a unique vision for advancing AI and the potential to transform industries.
Artificial Intelligence
Facebook parent Meta unveils LLaMA 2 open-source AI model for commercial use 
Not only is this new large language model (LLM) now available, it’s also open-source and freely available for commercial use — unlike the first LLaMA, which was licensed only for research purposes.
Artificial Intelligence
Digital.ai Boosts Predictive Intelligence and AI Across the Software Delivery Lifecycle, Offers New Support for Enterprise-grade Generative AI Coding Tools
Digital.ai’s AI-Powered DevSecOps Platform reflects enterprise demand to use AI to improve decision making, help govern and orchestrate the release of software created and optimized by generative AI tools, and automate software delivery workflows further with AI.
DevOps
DataStax brings vector database search to multicloud with Astra DB
Anuff explained that DataStax’s vector search uses vector columns as a native data type in Astra DB. With vectors as a data type, Astra DB users can query and search much as they would with any other type of data.
Data & Analytics
High Wire Networks Introduces Next-Gen, Industry-Disruptive Cybersecurity Technology Utilizing New Overwatch Universal Secure Enterprise Browser Extension
The advanced technology is delivered through a proprietary Overwatch by High Wire universal web browser extension that combines simplicity of deployment and use with unrivalled capabilities. This innovative approach is anticipated to disrupt the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) space, add a new dimension to Identity and Access Management (IAM), and revolutionize the way enterprises secure their organizations.
Security
Splunk launches a generative AI assistant to tame observability data 
The main offering is the new Splunk AI Assistant, which is a ChatGPT-style generative AI chatbot that enables users to interact with observability data in a more natural, conversational way, and squeeze insights out of it more easily, Splunk said. One advantage is that it enables users to create Splunk Processing Language-based queries by simply asking questions of their data in natural language.
Data & Analytics
Lenovo unveils data management solutions for enterprise AI
Lenovo has announced its latest data management innovation, launching the ThinkSystem DG Enterprise Storage Arrays and ThinkSystem DM3010H Enterprise Storage Arrays. These all-flash arrays are designed to simplify AI workload enablement and unleash the value of data.
Data Management
Cybercrime detection company Netcraft raises $100M to drive growth 
The company’s threat detection and response platform uses extensive data collected over years of collecting threat data. Using the data, Netcraft’s platform delivers real-time threat identification and validation, benefiting customers and the broader online community. Notably, many of the world’s major browsers and leading antivirus software vendors use Netcraft’s intelligence feeds.
Security
Affitrum is Disrupting the Digital Advertising Industry and Addressing Fraud
Affitrum aims to tackle fake news and unethical advertising by building a community-powered platform where members can vote against advertisers with questionable practices. And by leveraging advanced AI software, the project hopes to offer timely data-driven insight and metrics to content creators. The establishment of a feedback channel will enable marketers to refine their ads and measure performances against competitors in a more organized and efficient manner.
Data & Analytics
Nasuni teams with Microsoft Sentinel to shield file data from cyber-threats
“Furthermore, with the new targeted restore capabilities, our platform can execute precision restores of the affected files in seconds. The service is powered by Nasuni’s patented global ransomware recovery process, which can recover millions of files in minutes.”
Security
Wix announces AI text-to-website generator
All a user has to do is interact with the Wix AI chatbot and describe the intent of their planned website. The bot asks a few questions to capture the right intent, and generates the entire website almost instantly, including a homepage and all the inner pages with text and images.
Automation & Productivity
Hammerspace nabs $56M for its data orchestration platform 
When a Hammerspace-powered application requires access to a record stored on remote infrastructure, administrators don’t have to create a copy of that file. Instead, the application can use Hammerspace to retrieve the original version of the file from the system where it’s kept. The result, according to the startup, is that fewer data copies are needed.
Data Management
Runway raises $27M to make financial planning more accessible and intelligent
The platform integrates with over 100 data sources, such as QuickBooks, NetSuite, Google Sheets and AWS, and automates the process of updating and maintaining financial forecasts. Runway also uses artificial intelligence to generate insights, scenarios and recommendations based on the business data and goals.
Automation & Productivity
Automox enlists ChatGPT to create scripts for endpoint device management 
The scripts, called Worklets, are written in Microsoft Corp. PowerShell for Windows clients and Bash for macOS and Linux and work with an agent installed on the endpoint. The new Otto AI capabilities enable developers and even business end-users to state their needs in plain English with the corresponding scripts generated by OpenAI LLC’s ChatGPT.
Automation & Productivity
US government agencies got hacked after Microsoft lost its keys
But fast forward four days later, Microsoft said that it still doesn’t know how Chinese hackers stole an inactive Microsoft account (MSA) consumer signing key used to breach the Exchange Online and Azure AD accounts of these organizations. The company remains tight-lipped about how Chinese-backed hackers managed to acquire a crucial key that allowed them to infiltrate multiple email accounts, including those of various federal government agencies.
Security
Teleport introduces AI-powered chat interface to streamline DevOps troubleshooting 
Use cases include troubleshooting common issues, with Teleport Assist suggesting commands and scripts based on an enterprise’s unique requirements to debug and resolve common issues plaguing infrastructures. It can be used to collect infrastructure details by interpreting natural language and generating commands to help DevOps teams more easily manage and access their cloud infrastructure.
Automation & Productivity
Data Extraction Tool May Lead to Discovery of New Polymers
The pipeline extracts material property records from published papers and populates the data into a new application called Polymer Scholar. The platform works like a browser to search polymers and materials properties by keyword, rather than reading through countless articles.
Data & Analytics
Cradlepoint differentiates its SASE platform with 5G support
The phased rollout of Cradlepoint’s 5G SASE solution will enable enterprises to create hybrid wireless and SD-WAN environments that optimize availability, quality of service, and security to edge, distributed, and mobile locations.
Network Management
Google’s AppSheet no-code app builder rolls out to more Google Workspace users 
Google is also making AppSheet available in the Business Plus tier of Workspace, as well as the Education Standard version and an edition geared towards nonprofits. Previously, the tool was included in only three of the productivity suite’s enterprise and education subscription tiers. Companies could also buy licenses through a standalone subscription.
Automation & Productivity
Cribl Announces New Features to Scale and Secure Open Observability for Large Enterprises
Recently, Cribl Search pioneered the concept of federated “search-in-place” and further solidified its position as a trailblazer in the industry by introducing Search to Amazon Security Lake earlier this year. Today’s release amplifies support for S3 buckets, Azure Blob, and GCP/GCS, and has uniquely integrated the capability to search against API-based endpoints like Zoom, Okta, and Google Workspaces.
Automation & Productivity
Cisco hosts containerized firewall on Catalyst switches to protect mixed IT/OT networks
“The integration of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems, also known as IT/OT integration, is a crucial process in industries such as manufacturing, energy, and utilities. While IT systems handle data management, OT systems manage physical processes and control systems for critical infrastructure such as power grids, water treatment plants, and manufacturing equipment,”
Network Management
Flatfile Launches Data Exchange Platform to Optimize File-Based Data Imports for Businesses
Flatfile, a pioneer of AI-assisted data exchange, this week announced the release of its Flatfile Data Exchange Platform, the industry’s first extensible platform for file-based data import. With this new release, Flatfile is reinventing the file-based data import category that has been defined by one-size-fits-all, single-purpose csv-import tools, with an extensible, API-first and event-driven data exchange platform for enterprise developers.
Data Management
GigaIO Unveils SuperNODE, a 32-GPU Solution for Generative AI and Accelerated Computing
Available today, the 32-GPU engineered solution, called SuperNODE, offers a simplified system capable of scaling multiple accelerator technologies such as GPUs and FPGAs without the latency, cost, and power overhead required for multi-CPU systems.
Automation & Productivity
Startup UniFabriX uses CXL memory technology to boost rack density
UniFabriX is pitching its Smart Memory Node technology as an alternative to socket-connected DRAM, which restricts memory capacity and bandwidth in CPUs. UniFabriX's technology is based on CXL (Compute Express Link), an industry-supported interconnect for processors, memory expansion, and accelerators.
Automation & Productivity
Auvik Solution Aims to Eliminate Shadow IT with Capabilities to Discover, Manage and Secure SaaS Environments
In fact, in the first quarter of 2023 Auvik SaaS Management has recorded 559.2% growth in usage of ChatGPT. The fast rise of popular generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have contributed to this trend. These tools are typically not deployed through central IT teams and instead are sourced directly by business stakeholders, often going unreported.
IT Management
Meta pushes envelope on AI training efficiency with new CM3leon image generator 
Meta Platforms Inc. today detailed CM3leon, an artificial intelligence model built for image generation tasks that can be trained using only a fraction of the hardware required by similar neural networks.
Automation & Productivity
GitHub updates platform with passkey authentication, DevOps streamlining
“Passkeys offer the strongest mix of security and reliability and make accounts significantly more secure without compromising account access, which remains an issue with other 2FA methods like SMS, TOTP and existing single-device security keys,”
Security
Netscout claims new ML-based DDoS protection for the edge is 90% effective
The AED platform is deployed at the network edge in front of a firewall, helping to identify potential risks and defend against advanced DDoS attacks with a combination of ML smarts and Netscout’s threat intelligence capabilities.
Security
National Cybersecurity Strategy implements ‘secure by design’ principles
The new National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan outlines more than 65 high-impact federal initiatives involving 18 different agencies and designed to combat cybercrimes and build a cyber-skilled workforce for the future.
Security
WormGPT: New AI Tool Allows Cybercriminals to Launch Sophisticated Cyber Attacks
According to findings from SlashNext, a new generative AI cybercrime tool called WormGPT has been advertised on underground forums as a way for adversaries to launch sophisticated phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks.
Security
Google Bard launches in EU, overcoming data privacy concerns in the region
In addition to making Bard more widely available, Google has also introduced a host of new features including text-to-speech capabilities, shareable Bard conversation links, Google Lens compatibility, and the ability to customize Bard responses — for example, adjusting for tone and style.
Automation & Productivity
Walmart goes all-in on generative AI – but with guardrails 
The Playground is connected to the internet but doesn’t share internal data. “From an information security perspective this helps us sleep better at night because instead of having associates using public instances of ChatGPT or others we have a controlled environment where we get to see what goes in, what comes out, we can identify hallucinations and can work more collaboratively,”
Artificial Intelligence
Kyndryl services blitz to target AI, security, sustainability
Bridge integrates all manner of management tools, intellectual property, and processes that Kyndryl has cultivated through years of delivering services – it was, after all, a division of IBM until November 2021. It then takes that centralized information and uses it to deliver as-a-service capabilities and applications that help control and manage enterprise infrastructure.
IT Management
Microsoft Bug Allowed Hackers to Breach Over Two Dozen Organizations via Forged Azure AD Tokens
"Storm-0558 acquired an inactive MSA consumer signing key and used it to forge authentication tokens for Azure AD enterprise and MSA consumer to access OWA and Outlook.com," the tech giant said in a deeper analysis of the campaign. "The method by which the actor acquired the key is a matter of ongoing investigation."
Security
Pinecone leads ‘explosion’ in vector databases for generative AI
The company said Thursday it has “way more than 100,000 free users and more than 4,000 paying customers,” reflecting an explosion of adoption by developers from small companies as well as enterprises that Pinecone said are experimenting like crazy with new applications.
Automation & Productivity
RecruitBot raises more funding to expand AI-driven recruitment platform
The company said that unlike traditional hiring platforms, RecruitBot is equipped with filters, including support for diversity, equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, combined with machine learning. This allows for rapid identification of candidates ideally suited for a role.
HR Tech
Google drops two new big AI announcements: A better Bard and new NotebookLM service
There are five new modes users can switch between for the types of responses they want Bard to provide: simple, long, short, professional or casual. What’s the difference? Google offers this example: “You can ask Bard to help you write a marketplace listing for a vintage armchair, and then shorten the response using the drop-down.
Automation & Productivity
AI startup Nomic raises $17M to build its open-source alternative to GPT-4 
New York-based Nomic, founded last year, has so far released two products, including an open-source large language model similar to ChatGPT that’s called GPT4ALL. It’s free to download for anyone to use, and it can run on small devices such as a laptop. The company’s second product is Atlas, which is a tool that makes it possible to visualize unstructured datasets that can be used to build other LLMs
Automation & Productivity
Squirrly Company Releases First Batch of AI Digital Assistants for Marketin Revolutionizing Business Success
The impact was astonishing, with three times more clients experiencing success and customer acquisition compared to previous methods. Squirrly’s Digital Assistant outperformed competitors like WordPress.org and WordPress.com, cementing its position as a game-changer in the industry.
Automation & Productivity
Secure Code Warrior raises $50M for product innovation and go-to-market efforts 
Its Learning Platform gives coders their own preferred learning pathway using a human approach that uncovers what the company says is the “secure developer inside of every coder.” Doing so is said to help development teams ship quality code faster, so they can focus on creating safe software.
DevOps
AP partners with OpenAI to explore news industry use cases for generative AI 
AP didn’t say exactly how it intends to integrate OpenAI’s LLM technology into its news business. However, OpenAI clearly intends to benefit from the increased access to AP’s news trove, as it will gain massive amounts of data to train and refine its AI systems.
Artificial Intelligence
Cisco addresses the rising identity-based attacks with Oort acquisition
Oort offers an API-driven, cloud-native and agentless platform that is designed to help eliminate identity visibility gaps across diverse data sources, uncovers misconfigurations, identifies security vulnerabilities and leverages predictive identity analytics to proactively stop attacks,
Security
Kinetica Announces Free Cloud Offering, Empowering Developers with Instant Access to Advanced Analytics
Unlike other offerings that expire after a trial period, provide limited functionality or require that the customer pay for infrastructure and storage, Kinetica Cloud is totally free forever for up to 10GB of data with full Kinetica database functionality, including Kinetica’s SQL-GPT, using Generative AI to turn language into SQL that executes quickly.
Data & Analytics
Microsoft makes ‘late’ entry into busy SSE market, rebrands Azure AD 
Microsoft introduced its new zero-trust network access (ZTNA) and secure web gateway (SWG) services under its Entra suite, leading to its official entry into the busy security services edge (SSE) market. The tech giant also rebranded its popular Azure Active Directory (AD) into Microsoft Entra ID.
Security
Zluri raises $20M to help enterprises deal with SaaS application sprawl 
Zluri’s software helps to resolve SaaS sprawl through a comprehensive application discovery engine and library of more than 800 SaaS integrations. This gives companies precious visibility into who is using what, enabling them to build a complete directory of all of the SaaS licenses they’re paying for.
IT Management
Crunchy Data Launches Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes Version 5.4
Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes 5.4 introduces support for ARM, a game-changing advancement that brings significant cost savings and improved price-to-performance ratio for businesses. By harnessing the power of ARM architecture, Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes now enables organizations to leverage cost-efficient hardware while delivering exceptional performance.
Data & Analytics
Cisco amps up security analytics software
Enhancements in SNA release 7.4.2 include the ability to more efficiently gather, process and store data; advanced detection capabilities; improved telemetry support; and the ability to run on Cisco’s high-performance UCS M6 hardware.
Security
Microsoft reveals Chinese hackers breached US government emails 
The attackers gained access to the Microsoft accounts through forged authentication tokens using an acquired Microsoft account consumer signing key, according to a blog post. That in turn provided the attackers an opening into Outlook Web Access in Exchange Online and Outlook.com.
Security
Elon Musk is leading a new AI startup that aims to understand the universe and compete with ChatGPT 
Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. said Musk has managed to put together some strong and exceptional talents for xAI’s fledgling team, and noted his aspirations to build a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” However, he said the company will likely struggle to outdo its more established rivals.
Artificial Intelligence
IBM intros safer entry-level FlashSystem
These snapshots are IBM’s Safeguarded Copy (SGC) which lets you make regular immutable snapshots on the same storage as the production data. These copies can be instantly accessed to recover data, which is faster than carrying out a mass restoration from a backup target array, the public cloud or a tape library. The now superseded 5035 did not have this capability.
Data Storage
Google’s AI-powered notes app is now called NotebookLM, and it’s launching today
The core of NotebookLM seems to actually start in Google Docs. (“We’ll be adding additional formats soon,” the blog post says.) Once you get access to the app, you’ll be able to select a bunch of docs and then use NotebookLM to ask questions about them and even create new stuff with them.
Automation & Productivity
Dell cosies up to Microsoft with services for Azure and 365 users
The Texan vendor’s multicloud services for Azure include running containers & workloads natively in Azure, using Azure Stack HCI for hybrid, multicloud and edge use cases, and running VMware in the Azure cloud.
Cloud
Anthropic unveils Claude 2, an AI model that produces longer, safer responses
The new version has been trained on additional data to generate responses of up to 4,000 tokens, up from around 512 tokens in the last version released just four months ago (Claude 1.3). According to Anthropic, Claude 2 also significantly improves performance on metrics like coding, math and logic problems while generating more harmless responses, addressing concerns about potential misuse.
Artificial Intelligence
Exabeam Delivers Behavior Monitoring Solution Specifically for Federal Departments and Agencies
Among the compliance levels within M-21-31 that present comprehensive, detailed guidance for logging, orchestration, automation, response, user behavior monitoring, access, and incident visibility, the Exabeam offering will help agencies and departments achieve maturity Level EL3 (Event Logging Tier 3).
IT Management
IOTech’s Edge Connect enables real-time connectivity for industrial edge devices 
Edge Connect can read and write data from devices at rapid speed to support the highest volumes of data with low-latency, enabling businesses to tap the unique value generated by analyzing data in close to real time.
Data & Analytics
IBM watsonx Now Available for Enterprise AI Stacks
IBM users can tap the company’s expanded AI capabilities along with AI development toolkits from the Hugging  Face community for a range of generative AI innovations. watsonx is pre-trained on numerous use cases supporting simple and complex NLP tasks such as AI-generated content, code generation, text analytics, classification, conversational AI, summarization, and much more.
Automation & Productivity
ChaosSearch Unveils Chaos AI Assistant: Introducing Conversational AI for Log and Event Data Analytics
The core of this advancement lies in empowering users to engage in dialogues with their data, realizing actionable insights through natural language queries. This novel approach democratizes data analytics, making it accessible and intuitive for expert users, entry-level users, and non-technical users alike.
Data & Analytics
Collective raises $50M funding to launch AI-powered finance platform for freelancers
To meet the increasing demand, Collective used large language models (LLMs) to develop AI copilots. These copilots collaborate with a company’s tax experts, accountants, bookkeepers and relationship managers, significantly reducing the time required for essential processes like bank reconciliation and expense categorization.
Automation & Productivity
Dashworks launches AI assistant to streamline internal knowledge for enterprises, raises $5M
Whenever a query is made, Dash AI uses an API call to connect to the relevant applications and source the required information in real time. This means there’s no need to store or index proprietary information as is the case with legacy enterprise search solutions
Automation & Productivity
Salesforce plans 9% price hike for some of its most popular cloud products 
Salesforce isn’t the only big tech provider to respond by increasing the cost of its products. The 2023 ITAM Insights Report shows that multiple software firms have either increased or harmonized their pricing in certain regions. For instance, IBM Corp. in January raised prices for a whole host of its Passport Advantage Eligible offerings. Canadian customers were hit with a 19% increase, while in the U.K. and Europe, prices were hiked by 24%.
IT Management
Selector Enhances Network Observability and AIOps Platform with Full-Stack Capabilities
The Summer release enables organizations to delve deeper into their network infrastructure, cloud environments, containers, and applications, providing a holistic view of their entire application ecosystem. This empowers IT operations teams to proactively identify and resolve issues, optimize resource allocation, and prevent service interruptions.
Network Management
Aporia launches root cause analysis tool for real-time production data analysis
The company asserts that its Production Investigation Room (Production IR) tool provides data scientists, ML engineers, and analysts with a “one-of-a-kind” unified monitoring platform that offers a digital environment for real-time data analysis, root cause investigation and deep insights.
Data & Analytics
Upwork Launches New Generative AI Tools and Services Hub, Creating Central Destination for Skilled AI Talent and Work
Upwork has seen significant adoption of generative AI among independent professionals and businesses on its platform, with over 450% growth in weekly job posts related to generative AI compared to last year. To support this demand, Upwork unveiled its new AI Services hub, bringing AI-related work, skills and tools together into one place for customers
Tech Jobs
Checkout.com introduces AI-powered Identity Verification service for enhanced security 
Checkout.com’s new Identity Verification service uses generative artificial intelligence trained on billions of identity and facial recognition documents. The solution leverages an in-depth list of identification documents from 195 countries, enabling the Identity Verification service to verify nearly every citizen worldwide. Coming into the launch, Checkout.com’s Identity Verification verified more than 10 million identities and identified more than 1 million fraudulent identities in its beta testing phase.
Privacy & Security
Honeywell acquires SCADAfence, eyes $10B operational technology security market
Upon closing, Honeywell plans to integrate SCADAfence’s technologies into its Forge Cybersecurity+ suite within Honeywell Connected Enterprise, which is its software arm focusing on digitalization, sustainability and OT cybersecurity software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
Security
WiMi Hologram Cloud Developed a Novel Layered Fog Architecture for IoT SAaaS
WiMi’s novel layered fog architecture can be called Sensor and Actuator Service Layered Fog Delivery. It is more fault-resistant and maintains network connectivity by dynamically reassigning tasks from the failed node to the nearest active node. The architecture keeps track of user-pre-specified instructions.IoT
Sarah Silverman sues OpenAI, Meta over copyright infringement in AI training 
Much of BookCorpus, the plaintiffs say, was copied from a site called Smashwords, a host for self-published novels, which were under copyright. Additionally, the complaint alleges that there is no way that the book-based data sets used to train OpenAI came entirely from legal sources, as no legal databases offer enough content to account for the size of the “Books1” and “Books2” sets.
Artificial Intelligence
Beware of Big Head Ransomware: Spreading Through Fake Windows Updates
"One Big Head ransomware variant displays a fake Windows Update, potentially indicating that the ransomware was also distributed as a fake Windows Update," Fortinet researchers said at the time. "One of the variants has a Microsoft Word icon and was likely distributed as counterfeit software."
Privacy & Security
Verifiable reels in $27M to automate delay-ridden healthcare credentialing processes 
The company is addressing inefficiencies in healthcare administration costs, which make up about one-quarter of the estimated $4 trillion that is spent on healthcare in the U.S. each year. Lack of real-time access to data such as job histories, certifications and competency statements requires manual labor and incurs delays of between 60 and 120 days.
Automation & Productivity
Infisign Launches Groundbreaking Identity and Access Management
One of Infisign’s key features is its cryptographic algorithm which overhauls the existing Hardware Security Modules. By enabling DID communications, Infisign can reduce implementation costs for customers by around 80%. This cost-effective innovation is said to have the potential to significantly impact the cybersecurity landscape.
Privacy & Security
Quantexa commits to AI with $155M investment and new agnostic large language model 
Its new Q Assist platform is an agnostic large language model that allows analysts to interrogate Quantexa’s platforms with natural language queries, enhancing entity resolution, graph analytics and scoring capabilities. According to the company, the product breaks new ground in decision intelligence by enabling analysts to efficiently navigate large volumes of data using natural language.
Artificial Intelligence
CloudSoda brings some fizz to data migration
“We’ve … gone from a centralized data movement model to a distributed data movement model, and we can move data quickly, securely and automatically from anywhere to anywhere. We’re trying to just be storage agnostic ecosystem aware.”
Data Management
Instagram’s Threads surpasses 100 million users
Users aren’t just signing up: they’re posting, too. As of Thursday, my colleague Alex Heath reported that there have already been more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes shared on the app.
Social Media
Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting Instagram account, Meta says
A number of brands, including Netflix, Amazon, NFL, and Pepsi, have also expressed their vote of confidence in Threads by signing up to the app. However, many major names — Google, Apple, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Disney — remain mysteriously absent, at least as of the time of publication.
Social Media
OpenAI launches new alignment division to tackle risks of superintelligent AI
Current techniques for aligning AI include reinforcement learning from human feedback, but Leike and Sutskever said that as AI systems become smarter than humans, humans can no longer be relied upon to supervise the technology.
Artificial Intelligence
dtSearch Releases Version 2203.01 and Begins Beta Testing of Version 2023.02, Enhancing Search Capabilities for Enterprises and Developers
The product line’s proprietary document filters cover popular “Office” formats, website data, databases, compression formats, and emails with attachments. dtSearch products can run either “on premises” at organizations or in a cloud environment such as on Azure or AWS
Automation & Productivity
Two Spyware Apps on Google Play with 1.5 Million Users Sending Data to China
The report shows that both spyware apps, namely File Recovery and Data Recovery (com.spot.music.filedate) with over 1 million installs, and File Manager (com.file.box.master.gkd) with over 500,000 installs, are developed by the same group. These seemingly harmless Android apps use similar malicious tactics and automatically launch when the device reboots without user input.
Privacy & Security
Lightning Labs unveils tools that will allow AI to make bitcoin transactions 
Lightning Labs built its new tools atop Langchain, a framework for simplifying developing AI applications by combining LLMs with external data, and the L402 protocol, which is a Lightning-native authentication mechanism. Together these form LangChainBitcoin, a suite of tools that allows AI agents to directly interact with the bitcoin network to hold, send and receive currency.
Blockchain
Enhanced AI security on the horizon with Nvidia and Intel collaboration
Nvidia Corp. is collaborating with Intel Corp. to provide extensive attestation services for Nvidia H100 GPUs, using Intel Trust Domain Extensions and Intel’s trust service, “Project Amber,” for customers that deploy confidentiality-preserving artificial intelligence solutions.
Security
Vishing Goes High-Tech: New 'Letscall' Malware Employs Voice Traffic Routing
To facilitate the routing of voice traffic, "Letscall" utilizes cutting-edge technologies such as voice over IP (VOIP) and WebRTC. It also makes use of Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN) and Traversal Using Relays around NAT (TURN) protocols, including Google STUN servers, to ensure high-quality phone or video calls and bypass NAT and firewall restrictions.
Privacy & Security
Mixpanel Adds Generative AI So Companies Can ‘Chat With Their Data’
Mixpanel‘s application of generative AI allows queries built by AI to be reviewed so people can understand the source and accuracy of the report created, without the need to expose their proprietary data to the Large Language Model (LLM).
Artificial Intelligence
Twitter competitor Bluesky raises $8M; launches paid custom domains in a bid to remain sustainable
 “In the business of advertising, where social media companies exchange user data to serve ads to specific audiences, users become the product. Bluesky’s business model must be fundamentally different — we are a public social network and our code is all open source, so we have no “moat” when it comes to data.”
Social Media
Mindbreeze Unveils AI Platform for Enterprise-Level Knowledge Management
In contrast to applications such as ChatGPT, whose data origin is usually not traceable, Mindbreeze InSpire uses existing company data as the basis for machine learning to ensure that the data used to train the models always belong to the respective company and do not flow into a public model. Existing and generated content is always secure, correct, trustworthy, and, above all, traceable.
Artificial Intelligence
Mastercard launches new AI real-time anti-fraud tool in UK
Based on the results from TSB, Mastercard estimated that the number of scam payments prevented over the course of a year could save almost $127 million if implemented across all banks in the U.K., should the performance remain the same. The company said it’s assessing bringing its technology to global markets as well.
Privacy & Security
OpenAI launches its GPT-4 API into general availability 
The startup will open access to new developers later this month. Further down the road, OpenAI intends to increase the API’s usage limits. The company’s long-term plans, meanwhile, include the launch of a so-called fine-tuning capability, which will enable developers to enhance GPT-4’s accuracy by training it on custom datasets.
Artificial Intelligence
Silicom Launches Edge AI Product Line and Announces Partnership with Hailo
The new product line integrates Hailo’s AI-accelerators into Silicom’s existing Edge platforms, thereby solving performance challenges for Edge AI use cases. As a result, Silicom’s products will be able to offer visual processing and AI inference at the edge at a uniquely attractive price/performance ratio.
Automation & Productivity
Threads already has over 95 million posts
There’s still a lot missing from Threads. You can’t delete your Threads account without deleting your Instagram account, for example, and the app doesn’t have features like DMs, a reverse-chronological following feed, or a planned integration with the decentralized ActivityPub protocol. But these launch numbers point to a promising start for Meta’s new Twitter competitor.
Social Media
Vulnerability in Cisco Nexus 9000 switches may allow encrypted traffic to be intercepted 
The vulnerability, designated CVE-2023-20185, stems from a problem in the implementation of the ciphers used by the switches’ CloudSec encryption feature. If an attacker is in an on-path position between the ACI sites, they could exploit the vulnerability by intercepting the encrypted traffic and breaking the encryption using cryptanalytic techniques.
Security
Jamf and Google Cloud Collaborate to Enable Collaborative, Mobile Workforces Through New Advanced Security and Management Workflows
Jamf’s integration with BeyondCorp now supports device compliance signals for iOS and iPadOS. The addition of Apple’s mobile platforms builds on last year’s release of the Jamf and Google Cloud’s BeyondCorp integration for macOS. Jamf is the first management platform to support Apple desktop and mobile devices in this Zero Trust framework.
Automation & Productivity
Dig Security adds optical character recognition to help find sensitive information in image files 
With the release, Dig can detect that data in image files even when it’s stored in multicloud environments, such as passports and driver’s licenses. The OCR capabilities are critical as enterprises increasingly collect and store data in image files, since Dig claims that unless enterprises can map all sensitive data, the data remains open to mass exposure.
Document Management
Meta unspools Threads
Ultimately, Mosseri told me in an interview today, the company hopes to let your audience with you when you leave the new app. That’s a level of freedom the users of Facebook or Instagram — or really any other big social app — have never had.
Social Media
OpenAI forms research team to tackle dangers of AI ‘superintelligence’ 
The startup believes that current approaches to preventing AI harms are insufficient because they rely on humans to scrutinize machine learning models. “Humans won’t be able to reliably supervise AI systems much smarter than us,” Sutskever and Leike explained. They believe the answer to the challenge is to develop a “roughly human-level automated alignment researcher” powered by AI.
Artificial Intelligence
Kinnu, creator of a generative AI-powered learning app, raises $6.5M in funding 
Kinnu’s platform uses generative AI as one part of a three-pronged approach to content creation. First, human experts create a course outline or pathway. That’s fed into Kinnu’s large language models, similar to those that power OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT, which identify the main idea of each course and create relevant revision questions in various formats, such as multiple choice. Kinnu then makes these AI-powered educational courses available through its mobile application.
EDTech
IBM shutters Cloud for Education service just two years after launch
The launch came at a time when it was assumed they would all embrace remote learning given the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The service offered educators access to computing lab resources from any location via a number of research-optimized virtual machines that were preconfigured with applications such as IBM’s SPSS statistics software.
EDTech
ImmuniWeb offers free email security testing amid rising cyberthreats
The new free email security test is designed to provide a thorough response to potential cyberthreats by providing a comprehensive check of email server security, encryption and compliance with best practices. The service’s features include identifying DNS misconfigurations, discovering potentially compromised credentials and detecting active phishing and squatting campaigns. The tool also enables users to verify if their email server is listed on any dark web sites or spam lists.
Privacy & Security
Oracle Offers Free Training and Certification Program as Demand for Cloud and AI Accelerates
To help accelerate careers in high growth areas like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and to keep up with the growing