Computers & the Internet News and Discussions

[wjfox]

AT&T’s new 5-gig and 2-gig fiber internet is here, starting at $110 a month

Jan 24, 2022

AT&T is rolling out 2Gbps and 5Gbps speed tiers for its fiber-optic internet option. The company made the announcement to kick off its Life Gigified event, where it said new and existing AT&T Fiber customers will soon be able to take advantage of these multi-gig connections.

If you don’t know what multi-gig is, it means a single connection that offers speeds higher than 1Gbps. AT&T’s new multi-gig speeds need Wi-Fi 6 technology for “optimal” performance, which means you’ll probably want to upgrade your router, and of course, AT&T has a new “All-Fi” device ready. The company may offer even faster speeds eventually; AT&T says it reached speeds of 10Gbps in a lab environment.

The 2Gbps plan will cost $110 / month, while the 5Gbps plan is priced at $180 / month.

[...]

These new speed tiers will be available in over 70 metro areas, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Dallas. AT&T currently offers its fiber-optic network near cities spread out across the Southern, Midwestern, and Western portions of the US, but it plans to expand its service network to 30 million customers by 2025.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/24/2289 ... ons-speeds

[caltrek]

Maybe Green Energy Needs ‘Information Batteries' Too
by Matt Simon
January 31, 2022

https://www.wired.com/story/maybe-green ... eries-too/

Introduction:

(Wired) FOR ALL ITS faults—and there are many—the electrical grid in the United States is a miracle worker: If you flip a switch the lights come on, almost without fail. But as renewables like solar and wind replace fossil fuels, that miracle work gets a bit tougher because sunlight and wind aren’t always available. Navigating this intermittency, as it’s known among energy geeks, demands a fundamental rethink of how consumers use and even help store energy. One day electric vehicle drivers might, for instance, use their cars as a vast network of batteries that grid operators can tap into when renewables wane.

Another option might be to use information as batteries—of a sort. A pair of researchers has proposed that companies precompute certain data when the grid is humming with solar or wind power, and then stash it away for later use. Although the team dubbed the concept “information batteries,” don’t take “battery” to mean a physical device. This is digital, more of a timing strategy than a real battery, aimed at getting data-hungry companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix to use clean power when it’s plentiful so utilities can avoid burning fossil fuels when it’s not.

This kind of power use is somewhat flexible, says University of California San Diego computer scientist Jennifer Switzer. “You can't charge your car unless the battery has discharged at least a little bit, and you can't wash your clothes until your clothes are dirty,” says Switzer, one of the researchers who proposed the idea in a paper published earlier this month. “But with computing, if you have some way of predicting, with even a small amount of accuracy, what you're going to need in the future, then you can compute results before you actually need them and store those results. Instead of storing energy to use later, you're storing data.”

[wjfox]

Dystopian...

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New MoviePass App Will Use Eye Tracking To Force You To Watch Ads

Published 22 hours ago

Unskippable ads are annoying, right? My fellow British YouTube watchers have probably heard enough of the Just Eat ads to last a lifetime. But at least you don't actually have to pay attention to them, right?

Well, thanks to MoviePass rearing its controversial head once more, we might not be able to say that for much longer. The MoviePass 2.0 app is set to launch this summer, and will sustain itself using microcurrency and ads. However, unlike ads on any other platform, you will be forced to actually watch them, as they'll only play when your eyes are looking at the screen.

https://www.thegamer.com/moviepass-eye-tracking-ads/

[Yuli Ban]

Western Digital says it has lost at least 6.5 exabytes (6.5 billion gigabytes) of flash storage due to contamination issues at its NAND production facilities. The contamination could see the price of NAND — the main component of SSDs — spike up to 10 percent, according to market research firm TrendForce. Any potential NAND shortages or price fluctuations could affect the PC market over the next few months, which had another big year in 2021 despite global chip shortages and demand for GPUs.

The contamination of materials used in the manufacturing processes appears to have been detected in late January at two plants in Japan, with Western Digital’s joint venture partner, Kioxia (previously Toshiba), revealing it has affected BiCS 3D NAND flash memory.

Western Digital and Kioxia’s partnership amounts to around 30 percent of the NAND flash market, according to TrendForce. Both Western Digital and Kioxia primarily supply SSD and eMMC storage drives for PCs, and Western Digital is one of the leading suppliers in the industry.

[Yuli Ban]

Dystopian...

----------

New MoviePass App Will Use Eye Tracking To Force You To Watch Ads

Published 22 hours ago

Unskippable ads are annoying, right? My fellow British YouTube watchers have probably heard enough of the Just Eat ads to last a lifetime. But at least you don't actually have to pay attention to them, right?

Well, thanks to MoviePass rearing its controversial head once more, we might not be able to say that for much longer. The MoviePass 2.0 app is set to launch this summer, and will sustain itself using microcurrency and ads. However, unlike ads on any other platform, you will be forced to actually watch them, as they'll only play when your eyes are looking at the screen.

https://www.thegamer.com/moviepass-eye-tracking-ads/

I think literally everyone saw this coming. I personally called it way back in 2015 on the defunct KurzweilAI forums that this was going to happen because of how obsessively companies' profits required ad growth and how advanced biometrics were going to get. I just didn't think it'd be this soon.

[erowind]

/\ Awful. That is genuinely the limit for me, the moment youtube and other major services adopt that method is the moment i’m done consuming that media. Hope to god adblocker and or youtube downloaders still work.

[wjfox]

the moment youtube and other major services adopt that method is the moment i’m done consuming that media.

Same here. Hopefully there's a massive backlash over it, and/or regulations to stop it.

[weatheriscool]

A tensor language prototype for high-performance computers
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-02-ten ... mance.html
by Steve Nadis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

High-performance computing is needed for an ever-growing number of tasks—such as image processing or various deep learning applications on neural nets—where one must plow through immense piles of data, and do so reasonably quickly, or else it could take ridiculous amounts of time. It's widely believed that, in carrying out operations of this sort, there are unavoidable trade-offs between speed and reliability. If speed is the top priority, according to this view, then reliability will likely suffer, and vice versa.

However, a team of researchers, based mainly at MIT, is calling that notion into question, claiming that one can, in fact, have it all. With the new programming language, which they've written specifically for high-performance computing, says Amanda Liu, a second-year Ph.D. student at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), "speed and correctness do not have to compete. Instead, they can go together, hand-in-hand, in the programs we write."

Liu—along with University of California at Berkeley postdoc Gilbert Louis Bernstein, MIT Associate Professor Adam Chlipala, and MIT Assistant Professor Jonathan Ragan-Kelley—described the potential of their recently developed creation, "A Tensor Language" (ATL), last month at the Principles of Programming Languages conference in Philadelphia.

"Everything in our language," Liu says, "is aimed at producing either a single number or a tensor." Tensors, in turn, are generalizations of vectors and matrices. Whereas vectors are one-dimensional objects (often represented by individual arrows) and matrices are familiar two-dimensional arrays of numbers, tensors are n-dimensional arrays, which could take the form of a 3x3x3 array, for instance, or something of even higher (or lower) dimensions.

[weatheriscool]

Hiddenite: A new AI processor for reduced computational power consumption based on a cutting-edge neural network theory
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-02-hid ... ption.html
by Tokyo Institute of Technology

A new accelerator chip called Hiddenite that can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in the calculation of sparse hidden neural networks with lower computational burdens has now been developed by Tokyo Tech researchers. By employing the proposed on-chip model construction, which is the combination of weight generation and supermask expansion, the Hiddenite chip drastically reduces external memory access for enhanced computational efficiency.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are complex pieces of machine learning architecture for AI that require numerous parameters to learn to predict outputs. DNNs can, however, be "pruned," thereby reducing the computational burden and model size. A few years ago, the lottery ticket hypothesis took the machine learning world by storm. The hypothesis stated that a randomly initialized DNN contains subnetworks that achieve accuracy equivalent to the original DNN after training. The larger the network, the more "lottery tickets" for successful optimization. These lottery tickets thus allow "pruned" sparse neural networks to achieve accuracy equivalent to more complex, "dense" networks, thereby reducing overall computational burdens and power consumptions.

One technique to find such subnetworks is the hidden neural network (HNN) algorithm, which uses AND logic (where the output is only high when all the inputs are high) on the initialized random weights and a "binary mask" called a "supermask" (Fig. 1). The supermask, defined by the top-k% highest scores, denotes the unselected and selected connections as 0 and 1, respectively. The HNN helps reduce computational efficiency from the software side. However, the computation of neural networks also requires improvements in the hardware components.
The new Hiddenite chip offers on-chip weight generation and on-chi

[Yuli Ban]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine read more by land, air and sea risks reverberating across the global chip industry and exacerbating current supply-chain constraints. Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas critical for lasers used in chipmaking and supplies more than 90% of U.S. semiconductor-grade neon, according to estimates from research firm Techcet. About 35% of palladium, a rare metal also used for semiconductors, is sourced from Russia. A full-scale conflict disrupting exports of these elements might hit players like Intel , which gets about 50% of its neon from Eastern Europe according to JPMorgan.

[weatheriscool]

Breakthrough discovery in light interactions with nanoparticles paves the way for advances in optical computing
https://phys.org/news/2022-02-breakthro ... paves.html
by CUNY Advanced Science Research Center

Computers are an indispensable part of our daily lives, and the need for ones that can work faster, solve complex problems more efficiently, and leave smaller environmental footprints by minimizing the required energy for computation is increasingly urgent. Recent progress in photonics has shown that it's possible to achieve more efficient computing through optical devices that use interactions between metamaterials and light waves to apply mathematical operations of interest on the input signals, and even solve complex mathematical problems. But to date, such computers have required a large footprint and precise, large-area fabrication of the components, which, because of their size, are difficult to scale into more complex networks.

A newly published paper in Physical Review Letters from researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) details a breakthrough discovery in nanomaterials and light-wave interactions that paves the way for development of small, low-energy optical computers capable of advanced computing.

[Yuli Ban]

Graphcore today unveiled the world’s first 3D Wafer-on-Wafer processor - the Bow IPU - which is at the heart of our next generation Bow Pod AI computer systems, delivering up to 40% higher performance and 16% better power efficiency for real world AI applications than its predecessors, all for the same price and requiring no changes to existing software.


The flagship Bow Pod256 delivers more than 89 PetaFLOPS of AI compute, while the superscale Bow POD1024 packs 350 PetaFLOPS of AI compute, allowing machine learning engineers to stay ahead of the exponentially growing size of AI models and to make new breakthroughs in machine intelligence.

Customer success
Our new Bow Pod systems are available now and have begun shipping worldwide.

One of the first customers to take advantage of Bow’s improved performance and efficiency will be the U.S Department of Energy’s (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. (PNNL) for applications including cybersecurity and computational chemistry.

“At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, we are pushing the boundaries of machine learning and graph neural networks to tackle scientific problems that have been intractable with existing technology,” said Sutanay Choudhury, deputy director of PNNL's Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Institute.

[Yuli Ban]

Elon Musk’s Starlink Becomes Most-Downloaded App In Ukraine

Starlink, the app that enables mobile users to access SpaceX’s satellite internet service of the same name, was the most-downloaded app in Ukraine Monday afternoon after reaching the top spot Sunday, according to data seen by the Wall Street Journal, following SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s rapid delivery of the terminals that provide the service to the war-torn country last month.

And what's interesting is that they are apparently able to get 200Mbps download speeds there. People in a war zone have better internet than I do!

[raklian]

Elon Musk’s Starlink Becomes Most-Downloaded App In Ukraine

Starlink, the app that enables mobile users to access SpaceX’s satellite internet service of the same name, was the most-downloaded app in Ukraine Monday afternoon after reaching the top spot Sunday, according to data seen by the Wall Street Journal, following SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s rapid delivery of the terminals that provide the service to the war-torn country last month.

And what's interesting is that they are apparently able to get 200Mbps download speeds there. People in a war zone have better internet than I do!

And they're using it to transact in cryptocurrencies. Ever since Starlink was sent to Ukraine, demand for Bitcoin and other crypto shot up.

[caltrek]

Our host would like to see some more likes for this post:

https://www.futuretimeline.net/data-tre ... es-law.htm

[weatheriscool]

New technique offers faster security for non-volatile memory tech
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-04-tec ... -tech.html
by Matt Shipman, North Carolina State University

Researchers have developed a technique that leverages hardware and software to improve file system security for next-generation memory technologies called non-volatile memories (NVMs). The new encryption technique also permits faster performance than existing software security technologies.

"NVMs are an emerging technology that allows rapid access to the data, and retains data even when a system crashes or loses power," says Amro Awad, senior author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. "However, the features that give NVMs these attractive characteristics also make it difficult to encrypt files on NVM devices—which raises security concerns. We've developed a way to secure files on NVM devices without sacrificing the speed that makes NVMs attractive."

"Our technique allows for file-level encryption in fast NVM memories, while cutting the related execution time significantly," says Kazi Abu Zubair, first author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at NC State.

Traditionally, computers use two types of data storage. Dynamic random access memory (DRAM) allows quick access to stored data, but will lose that data if the system crashes. Long-term storage technologies, such as hard drives, are good at retaining data even if a system loses power—but store the data in a way that makes it slower to access.

NVMs combine the best features of both technologies. However, securing files on NVM devices can be challenging.

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Cloud server leasing can leave sensitive data up for grabs

by Pennsylvania State University
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-04-clo ... itive.html

Renting space and IP addresses on a public server has become standard business practice, but according to a team of Penn State computer scientists, current industry practices can lead to "cloud squatting," which can create a security risk, endangering sensitive customer and organization data intended to remain private.

Cloud squatting occurs when a company, such as your bank, leases space and IP addresses—unique addresses that identify individual computers or computer networks—on a public server, uses them, and then releases the space and addresses back to the public server company, a standard pattern seen every day. The public server company, such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, then assigns the same addresses to a second company.  If this second company is a bad actor, it can receive information coming into the address intended for the original company—for example, when you as a customer unknowingly use an outdated link when interacting with your bank—and use it to its advantage—cloud squatting.

[caltrek]

China Further Limits Access to Unauthorized Foreign Games
by Rita Liao
April 15, 2022

https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/15/china ... ign-games/

Introduction:

(TechCrunch) For years, China has left a loophole open for people to access unauthorized video games, but it’s ready to close it.

Many foreign titles lack a Chinese publishing partner like Tencent to help them obtain the government-issued license needed to operate in the country, so players normally rely on an “accelerator” to reduce delays of overseas-hosted games.

On Wednesday, Tencent, the world’s largest online gaming company, announced it will terminate its gaming booster that allows users to play overseas games. Though not explicitly said in the notice, some users see the decision as the authorities’ stepping up to limit access to foreign gameplay. Tencent’s rival NetEase also runs a similar service, which is still operating.

The other signal of enhanced control came on Friday when China’s National Radio and Television Administration, the regulator granting video games licenses, said platforms will be “strictly prohibited” from livestreaming games that have not been authorized by the government. Platforms, including their individual and business accounts, should gain approval before broadcasting overseas games or matches, the notice said.

This will substantially shrink the number of games that China’s livestreaming hosts can discuss, which could put many of them out of work, as China has slowed down the approval process for new games over the last few years. Many foreign titles may not be officially available in China, but a big market exists where commentary and matches of blockbuster international games are featured on the country’s live broadcasting platforms like Huya and Douyu.

[Yuli Ban]

TSMC: 2nm Chips Arriving in 2026

When Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company first confirmed the development of its N2 (2 nm-class) fabrication process in 2020, it did not disclose many details about the node or say when it intends it was set to enter production. This week, the company confirmed that the technology relies on a new transistor structure, but chips that use it won't become available until 2026.

N2 on Track for HVM in H2 2025
C.C. Wei, chief executive of TSMC, this week formally confirmed that the company's N2 node will, as expected, rely on gate-all-around (GAA) transistors (though he did not elaborate on details or reveal the marketing name of the architecture). The fabrication process will continue to rely on existing extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, with a 0.33 numerical aperture.

The technology is expected to be ready for risk production sometime at the end of 2024 and for high-volume manufacturing (HVM) toward the end of 2025. This means that TSMC's customers should receive their first N2-based chips in 2026.