Month: August 2018

Enlarge (credit: Steve Johnson / Flickr)

Most broadband providers in the UK "have been forced to cut the headline speeds they advertise when selling deals" because of new UK rules requiring accurate speed claims, according to a consumer advocacy group.

"Eleven major suppliers have had to cut the advertised speed of some of their deals, with the cheapest deals dropping by 41 percent," the group wrote last week.

The analysis was conducted by Which?, a brand name used by the Consumers' Association, a UK-based charity that does product research and advocacy on behalf of consumers.

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

A key chip supplier for iPhones, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., said the virulent WannaCry ransomware worm infected its production lines over the weekend. The incident shows how the malicious malware continues to leave a wake of $100 million-plus losses 15 months after it first took flight.

“This virus outbreak occurred due to misoperation during the software installation process for a new tool, which caused a virus to spread once the tool was connected to the company’s computer network,” TSMC officials wrote in a statement published Sunday. In statements made on Monday, the officials identified the malware as WannaCry, which gained international attention in May 2017 when it shut down computers worldwide. The company said it expected the disruption to lower third-quarter revenue by as much as 3 percent. With the chipmaker previously forecasting revenue in the quarter to be $8.45 billion to $8.55 billion, the hit to revenue could be as high as $256 million.

TSMC said it had 80 percent of affected chip fabrication systems back online on Sunday and expected to restore the remainder by Monday. The shutdown comes at a critical time for Apple, which accounts for 21 percent of TSMC’s revenue, according to Bloomberg News. Apple is reportedly planning to release three new iPhone models by year’s end. It’s not yet clear if the shutdown might affect the chip output Apple relies on for the new devices. Shares of Apple stock were trading up about 0.4 percent on Monday as this post was being prepared.

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Facebook is pushing back against a report in Monday's Wall Street Journal that the company is asking major banks to provide private financial data.

The social media giant has reportedly had talks with JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and US Bancorp to discuss proposed features including fraud alerts and checking account balances via Messenger.

Elisabeth Diana, a Facebook spokeswoman, told Ars that while the WSJ reported that Facebook has "asked" banks "to share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking-account balances," this isn't quite right.

Enlarge / Shadow Fiend, looking shadowy and fiendish. (credit: Valve)

A team of computer-controlled bots took on a team of top human players in a Dota 2 show match this weekend, and the computer didn't just beat the humans—it crushed them.

We were first introduced to OpenAI's Dota 2 bot at last year's International, the multimillion dollar Valve-hosted tournament that's the climax of the competitive season. Backed by Elon Musk, OpenAI's ambition is to ensure that when artificial intelligence is created it will be good for humans: think Lt. Cmdr. Data rather than Skynet or The Matrix. The OpenAI team is looking at Dota 2 because the game is enormously more complex than games like chess or Go. Unlike those games, Dota 2 is played with imperfect knowledge (you can't see the whole map at once, so enemy movements can be hidden), it's made up of thousands of moves over tens of minutes, and its goals are relatively long-term, making it hard to assess in the moment what action is best or which side has the advantage.

The bots learned to play Dota 2 through playing hundreds of years of matches against itself, previous versions of itself, and preprogrammed scripted bots. For last year's bot, the training was done on Microsoft's Azure platform with some 60,000 processor cores; this time around, OpenAI is using 128,000 cores on Google's Cloud Platform. The bots learn the game from scratch: initial versions will just wander aimlessly and at random as the game plays itself out. As thousands upon thousands of games are played, it figures out which actions will improve its chance of winning.