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AI Computing Is on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says

April 20, 2024

AI Computing Is on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says

(Bloomberg) — AI’s voracious need for computing power is threatening to overwhelm energy sources, requiring the industry to change its approach to the technology, according to Arm Holdings Plc Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas.

By 2030, the world’s data centers are on course to use more electricity than India, the world’s most populous country, Haas said. Finding ways to head off that projected tripling of energy use is paramount if artificial intelligence is going to achieve its promise, he said.

“We are still incredibly in the early days in terms of the capabilities,” Haas said in an interview. For AI systems to get better, they will need more training — a stage that involves bombarding the software with data — and that’s going to run up against the limits of energy capacity, he said.

Haas joins a growing number of people raising alarms about the toll AI could take on the world’s infrastructure. But he also has an interest in the industry shifting more to Arm chips designs, which are gaining a bigger foothold in data centers. The company’s technology — already prevalent in smartphones — was developed to use energy more efficiently than traditional server chips.

Arm, which began trading on the Nasdaq last year after 2023’s largest US initial public offering, sees AI and data center computing as one of its biggest growth drivers. Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS, Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. are using Arm’s technology as the basis of in-house chips that help run their server farms. As part of that shift, they’re decreasing reliance on off-the-shelf parts made by Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

By using more custom-built chips, companies can lessen bottlenecks and save energy, according to Haas. Such a strategy could reduce data center power by more than 15%.

“There needs to be broad breakthroughs,” he said. “Any piece of efficiency matters.”

What You Think Is Controlled By What You Watch, And What You Watch Is Controlled By The Elite

October 25, 2019

What You Think Is Controlled By What You Watch, And What You Watch Is Controlled By The Elite

Why do you believe what you believe?  Some people have a really solid answer to that question, but much of the population never thinks much about deeper questions such as this.  In fact, for most Americans it is simply easier to let others do their thinking for them.  Today, most of us spend multiple hours each day absorbing information through a screen, and most of the content that is fed to us through our televisions, phones, tablets and computers is controlled by the elite.  And if you allow anyone to feed information into your mind for several hours every day, it is going to have a dramatic impact on how you view the world.

When I was younger, one of my favorite movies was “The Matrix”, and I think that it is a really good metaphor for what is going on in our society today.  In the film, nearly the entire human population was plugged into a system which continuously fed a computer-generated reality into their minds that wasn’t real at all.  Later on, I eventually came to realize that we are willingly doing the same thing to ourselves.  Our personal interactions with one another are extremely limited, but we willingly “plug in” to the enormous matrix of news, information and entertainment that the elite have constructed for many hours each day.

According to numbers that were released earlier this year, the average American spends more than three hours watching television and more than three hours on mobile devices every single day…

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Deepfake News The Next Frontier In Phony Journalism

February 19, 2019

Deepfake News The Next Frontier In Phony Journalism

Computers can now imitate human writing. Is it the start of a fake news avalanche?

Fake news may be the issue of the day, but what about “deepfake” news – that is, articles written by an artificial intelligence (AI) machine only pretending to be human? OpenAI, a company backed by several Silicon Valley heavyweights, claims it has developed a software that can mimic human writing so convincingly that those who invented it are too scared to divulge the full details. After being fed an initial sentence or question to start the ball rolling, the AI program GPT2 generates text in either fiction or non-fiction genres, matching the style of the initial human-input prompt. 

“…it’s possible to generate malicious-esque content quite easily.”

“Deepfakes” are phony content created by “deep learning” (artificial intelligence) computers. This is a quickly developing field, but the researchers behind GTP2 have refused to release the full version of the product, due to concerns about it “being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale.” In other words, fake news and objectionable material can now be composed at speeds beyond the capabilities of human writers and sent out to spam the world.

Breaking News: Scientists Discover Unicorn!

Previous attempts at such technology stumbled when the bots were unable to “remember” details of the story and context; the GPT2 program, however, can compose a narrative without losing track of these elements. After receiving one or two lines as a prompt, the technology went on to write convincing fake news stories about nuclear material being stolen in Cincinnati, scientists discovering a unicorn (albeit one with four horns), performer Miley Cyrus being caught shoplifting, as well as Lord of the Rings fan fiction and an essay on why the American Civil War occurred – of which the first paragraph reads:

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The “Meltdown” Story: How A Researcher Discovered The “Worst” Flaw In Intel History

January 5, 2018

The “Meltdown” Story: How A Researcher Discovered The “Worst” Flaw In Intel History

Daniel Gruss didn’t sleep much the night he hacked his own computer and exposed a flaw in most of the chips made in the past two decades by hardware giant Intel, something we discussed in “Why The Implications Of The Intel “Bug” Are Staggering.” And as Reuters describes in fascinating detail, the 31-year-old information security researcher and post-doctoral fellow at Austria’s Graz Technical University had just breached the inner sanctum of his computer’s CPU and stolen secrets from it.

Until that moment, Gruss and colleagues Moritz Lipp and Michael Schwarz had thought such an attack on the processor’s ‘kernel’ memory, which is meant to be inaccessible to users, was only theoretically possible.

“When I saw my private website addresses from Firefox being dumped by the tool I wrote, I was really shocked,” Gruss told Reuters in an email interview, describing how he had unlocked personal data that should be secured.
Gruss, Lipp and Schwarz, working from their homes on a weekend in early December, messaged each other furiously to verify the result.

“We sat for hours in disbelief until we eliminated any possibility that this result was wrong,” said Gruss, whose mind kept racing even after powering down his computer, so he barely caught a wink of sleep.

Gruss and his colleagues had just confirmed the existence of what he regards as “one of the worst CPU bugs ever found”.

The flaw, now named Meltdown, was revealed on Wednesday and affects most processors manufactured by Intel since 1995.

Separately, a second defect called Spectre has been found that also exposes core memory in most computers and mobile devices running on chips made by Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and ARM Holdings, a unit of Japan’s Softbank.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How A North Korean Electromagnetic Pulse Attack Could Kill Millions And Turn America Into A Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

November 29, 2017

How A North Korean Electromagnetic Pulse Attack Could Kill Millions And Turn America Into A Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

This is why North Korea’s test of an intercontinental ballistic missile is so important.  North Korea had test fired a total of 22 missiles so far this year, but this latest one showed that nobody on the globe is out of their reach.  In fact, General Mattis is now admitting that “North Korea can basically threaten everywhere in the world”, and that includes the entire continental United States.  In addition to hitting individual cities with nukes, there is also the possibility that someday North Korea could try to take down the entire country with an EMP attack.  If the North Koreans detonated a single nuclear warhead several hundred miles above the center of the country, it would destroy the power grid and fry electronics from coast to coast.

I would like you to think about what that would mean for a few moments.  Suddenly there would be no power at home, at work or at school.  Since nearly all of our vehicles rely on computerized systems, you wouldn’t be able to go anywhere and nobody would be able to get to you.  And you wouldn’t be able to contact anyone because all phones would be dead.  Basically, pretty much everything electronic would be dead.  I am talking about computers, televisions, GPS devices, ATMs, heating and cooling systems, refrigerators, credit card readers, gas pumps, cash registers, hospital equipment, traffic lights, etc.

For the first couple of days life would continue somewhat normally, but then people would soon start to realize that the power isn’t coming back on and panic would begin to erupt.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Way GCHQ Obliterated The Guardian’s Laptops May Have Revealed More Than It Intended

August 27, 2015

The Way GCHQ Obliterated The Guardian’s Laptops May Have Revealed More Than It Intended

In July 2013, GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency,forced journalists at the London headquarters of The Guardian to completely obliterate the memory of the computers on which they kept copies of top-secret documents provided to them by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

However, in its attempt to destroy information, GCHQ also revealed intriguing details about what it did and why.

Two technologists, Mustafa Al-Bassam and Richard Tynan, visited Guardianheadquarters last year to examine the remnants of the devices. Al-Bassam is an ex-hacker who two years ago pleaded guilty to joining attacks on Sony, Nintendo, and other companies, and now studies computer science at King’s College; Tynan is a technologist at Privacy International with a PhD in computer science. The pair concluded, first, that GCHQ wanted The Guardian to completely destroy every possible bit of information the news outlet might retain; and second, that GCHQ’s instructions may have inadvertently revealed all the locations in your computer where information may be covertly stored.

 

Editors of The Guardian chose to destroy the files and the devices they lived on after the British government threatened to sue them and halt further reporting on the issue, including stories on how GCHQ utilized data collected by the NSA on communications from many major Internet companies.

Footage of Guardian editors physically destroying their MacBooks and USB drives, taken by Guardian executive Sheila Fitzsimons, wasn’t released until months later, in January 2014. The GCHQ agents who supervised the destruction of the devices also insisted on recording it all on their own iPhones.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Computers Are Listening: How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text

May 6, 2015

THE COMPUTERS ARE LISTENING: HOW THE NSA CONVERTS SPOKEN WORDS INTO SEARCHABLE TEXT

Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record.

But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either.

Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.

The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.

Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documentsdescribe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.

The documents include vivid examples of the use of speech recognition in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Latin America. But they leave unclear exactly how widely the spy agency uses this ability, particularly in programs that pick up considerable amounts of conversations that include people who live in or are citizens of the United States.

Spying on international telephone calls has always been a staple of NSA surveillance, but the requirement that an actual person do the listening meant it was effectively limited to a tiny percentage of the total traffic. By leveraging advances in automated speech recognition, the NSA has entered the era of bulk listening.

And this has happened with no apparent public oversight, hearings or legislative action. Congress hasn’t shown signs of even knowing that it’s going on.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Cyber warfare may have similar impact on security as nukes’ — RT Op-Edge

January 2, 2015

‘Cyber warfare may have similar impact on security as nukes’ — RT Op-Edge.

A country with professional computer programmers and access to intelligence gathering capabilities has great potential for affecting global security as nuclear weapons did 50 years ago, Dr. Duncan Earl, Chief Technology Officer of Qubitekk Inc. told RT.

RT: How big of a blow to global security are hackers able to deal?

Dr. Duncan Earl: I think it depends on how you define the term ‘hacker’. Most people think of a hacker as a loose group of computer programmers which have limited computational capabilities. So if you define a hacker that way there is not a big impact on global security that this group can have. However, if you describe a hacker, if you expand that to include nation states, where you can have a country with a very large number of computer programmers with access to supercomputers, with access to intelligence gathering capabilities – in that situation there is a huge potential for affecting global security. In fact, cyber-warfare is likely to have the impact on global security that nuclear weapons did 50 years ago.

RT: How can companies and strategically vital institutions such as nuclear plants defend themselves against hack attacks?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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