Month: July 2022

Enlarge (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko | Moment)

This is not the summer that Americans want to deal with an unknown number of cryptocurrency firms unexpectedly flooding the power grid. More Americans are already expecting to experience rolling blackouts as the nation's power grid strains against record heat and drought conditions currently spiking energy usage from coast to coast. Now, lawmakers are worried that US cryptocurrency mining operations planning for rapid growth will potentially further destabilize the grid while quietly spiking carbon emissions and driving up utility costs to more and more consumers.

That's why Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) joined five other Congress members to submit a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy, recommending the agencies combine forces to draft new regulations requiring emissions and energy use reporting from all cryptomining operations nationwide. Only then, Warren and others suggest, will we know exactly how many firms are operating in the US, how much energy is being used, how much damage to the environment is being done, and how many communities are being affected.

The letter provided the EPA and DOE with new information from Congress' investigation into the environmental impacts of "seven of the largest cryptomining operations in the US." It's just a fraction of the whole, but together, these firms plan to increase their total mining capacity by nearly 230 percent, requiring an added electricity consumption than is used to power all the homes in Los Angeles. None of the firms said that it tracks the impacts on consumers connected to power grids, and none of the firms seemed to think they had any reason to fully comply with Congress' request for information.

Enlarge / A woman looks at a work of art created by an algorithm by French collective named OBVIOUS, which produces art using artificial intelligence, titled Portrait of Edmond de Belamy at Christie's in New York on October 22, 2018. The piece sold for $432,500. (credit: Timothy A. Clary/Getty)

In just a few years, the number of artworks produced by self-described AI artists has dramatically increased. Some of these works have been sold by large auction houses for dizzying prices and have found their way into prestigious curated collections. Initially spearheaded by a few technologically knowledgeable artists who adopted computer programming as part of their creative process, AI art has recently been embraced by the masses, as image generation technology has become both more effective and easier to use without coding skills.

The AI art movement rides on the coattails of technical progress in computer vision, a research area dedicated to designing algorithms that can process meaningful visual information. A subclass of computer vision algorithms, called generative models, occupies center stage in this story. Generative models are artificial neural networks that can be “trained” on large datasets containing millions of images and learn to encode their statistically salient features. After training, they can produce completely new images that are not contained in the original dataset, often guided by text prompts that explicitly describe the desired results. Until recently, images produced through this approach remained somewhat lacking in coherence or detail, although they possessed an undeniable surrealist charm that captured the attention of many serious artists. However, earlier this year the tech company Open AI unveiled a new model—nicknamed DALL·E 2—that can generate remarkably consistent and relevant images from virtually any text prompt. DALL·E 2 can even produce images in specific styles and imitate famous artists rather convincingly, as long as the desired effect is adequately specified in the prompt. A similar tool has been released for free to the public under the name Craiyon (formerly “DALL·E mini”).

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Servers running the open source Asterisk communication software for Digium VoiP services are under attack by hackers who are managing to commandeer the machines to install web shell interfaces that give the attackers covert control, researchers have reported.

Researchers from security firm Palo Alto Networks said they suspect the hackers are gaining access to the on-premises servers by exploiting CVE-2021-45461. The critical remote code-execution flaw was discovered as a zero-day vulnerability late last year, when it was being exploited to execute malicious code on servers running fully updated versions of Rest Phone Apps, aka restapps, which is a VoiP package sold by a company called Sangoma.

The vulnerability resides in FreePBX, the world's most widely used open source software for Internet-based Private Branch Exchange systems, which enable internal and external communications in organizations' private internal telephone networks. CVE-2021-45461 carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10 and allows hackers to execute malicious code that takes complete control of servers.

Enlarge / There's not a lot to see in Google Wallet, just the usual NFC interface and a few loyalty cards.

Today is apparently the launch day for Google Wallet—Google's fourth rebrand of its payment system. Users on Reddit report the app has rolled out to them, and a version has popped up on APKMirror if you want to sideload. Google also launched a ton of support pages today relating to Wallet.

Google Wallet was announced at Google I/O 2022, and brings back the original Google payments product name. Wallet was originally around from 2011-2015, then it became Android Pay, then Google Pay in 2018, and now Wallet is back in 2022. Google's turbulent payment products have never been worse than right now, where the sort-of-outgoing product, Google Pay, has been on the market for just over a year.

While the Google Pay brand has been around longer than a year, Google pushed out a completely new codebase in March 2021. This new version of Google Pay used the codebase of "Google Tez," a payments product developed for India. Compared to the older Google Pay, New Google Pay had a ton of feature regressions, like losing support for logging into multiple devices, no support for multiple accounts, and no compatibility with anything that didn't have a SIM card, which meant the Google Pay website had to be stripped of functionality.