Month: February 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The Biden administration wants major changes to the Apple and Google mobile app models, saying the companies "act as gatekeepers over the apps that people and businesses rely on" and enforce policies that "have the potential to harm consumers by inflating prices and reducing innovation."

An analysis of the market and recommendations for lawmakers and regulators were issued today in a report by the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The report was required by President Biden's 2021 executive order on competition and touted by the White House today as being part of "new progress on his competition agenda."

The NTIA concluded that "consumers largely can't get apps outside of the app store model, controlled by Apple and Google," and that "Apple and Google create hurdles for developers to compete for consumers by imposing technical limits, such as restricting how apps can function or requiring developers to go through slow and opaque review processes."

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

SSDs have usurped hard disk drives (HDDs) when it comes to performance, but whether building a NAS or having high-capacity needs on a budget, plenty of people still rely on spinning platters. Older drives that have seen a lot of use, however, may not be as reliable as before. Data Backblaze shared this week highlights how a hard drive's average failure rate (AFR) can increase with age.

Since 2013, Backblaze, a backup and cloud-storage company, has been publishing an annual report analyzing the AFRs of hard drives in its data center. The 2022 report shared on Tuesday examines 230,921 hard drives across 29 models from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and WDC, with capacities ranging from 4–16TB. All models included at least 60 drives that were not previously used for testing.

Keep in mind that the sample group only consists of drives that Backblaze had on hand, and they are of varying ages, with some used for more days than others. However, Backblaze's report does give us a unique look into the results of long-term hard drive use.

Enlarge / An image from Stable Diffusion’s training set compared (left) to a similar Stable Diffusion generation (right) when prompted with "Ann Graham Lotz." (credit: Carlini et al., 2023)

On Monday, a group of AI researchers from Google, DeepMind, UC Berkeley, Princeton, and ETH Zurich released a paper outlining an adversarial attack that can extract a small percentage of training images from latent diffusion AI image synthesis models like Stable Diffusion. It challenges views that image synthesis models do not memorize their training data and that training data might remain private if not disclosed.

Recently, AI image synthesis models have been the subject of intense ethical debate and even legal action. Proponents and opponents of generative AI tools regularly argue over the privacy and copyright implications of these new technologies. Adding fuel to either side of the argument could dramatically affect potential legal regulation of the technology, and as a result, this latest paper, authored by Nicholas Carlini et al., has perked up ears in AI circles.

However, Carlini's results are not as clear-cut as they may first appear. Discovering instances of memorization in Stable Diffusion required 175 million image generations for testing and preexisting knowledge of trained images. Researchers only extracted 94 direct matches and 109 perceptual near-matches out of 350,000 high-probability-of-memorization images they tested (a set of known duplicates in the 160 million-image dataset used to train Stable Diffusion), resulting in a roughly 0.03 percent memorization rate in this particular scenario.

• 

  The S23 Series. Everything has a similar camera design this year. [credit: Samsung ]

It's a new year, and that means it's time for a new Samsung flagship. The Galaxy S23 series is official, with a tweaked design for the cheaper models and a big SoC change for international users. As always, there are three models: the 6.1-inch Galaxy S23, 6.6-inch S23 Plus, and 6.8-inch S23 Ultra.

With the release of the S23, Samsung is kicking off some internal drama, with Samsung's Galaxy phone "DX Division" spurning Samsung LSI—the division that produces Exynos chips—for not being good enough. In the past, the Galaxy S series has gone with dual suppliers for its SoC, where some regions get Qualcomm Snapdragon chips (usually the US, China, Japan, and Latin America) and others get Samsung Exynos chips (Europe, India, among others). The performance of Exynos chips is usually not up to the (second place) standard of Qualcomm, and Exynos customers who get stuck with a purely inferior phone are naturally disappointed. Exynos chips have made Samsung fans angry enough to make petitions begging for the superior Qualcomm model to be released in their markets.

This year, Samsung is listening and will be going all Qualcomm, all the time. The Exynos chips have been banished to lower-end devices, which is a wild turn of events after Samsung LSI scored an AMD collaboration last year and two years ago—perhaps out of desperation—started naming Exynos chips after Galaxy S phones, with the Exynos 2100 launching in the S21, and the Exynos 2200 launching in the S22. The Exynos division still supplies chips to various mid-range Samsung phones, and an orphaned Exynos 2300 chip is still floating around the rumor mill and might end up in a tablet or a cut-down version of the S23.