U.S. Law Enforcement Seizes Z-Library
On November 4, U.S. law enforcement seized a series of public domain names from the popular pirate e-book site Z-Library, and access to those domains resolved to DNS servers dedicated to the seized domains. Z-Library subsequently switched its DNS to an anonymous service provider by unknown means, but access has not yet been restored.
Z-Library has also had domain names confiscated or stopped resolving several times before in 2015 and 2021 due to complaints from publishers, but has managed to continue operations by changing domains and service providers. Since last month, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has been investigating the site, and TikTok has begun blocking related hashtags.
The operator, unknown, started as a mirror of other file-sharing sites, but later accepted user-directed uploads, resulting in an independent “brand” that now hosts 220 terabytes of data. unlike the traditionally underground file-sharing (warez) culture, which strictly controls the quality and format of content, the site requires less quality content and operates commercially through paid membership and other methods, and thus has also been criticized from some file-sharing sympathizers.
Twitter launches major layoffs
On the evening of Nov. 4 local time, Musk began a massive layoff at Twitter, involving about half of the company’s 7,500 employees, but less than the 75 percent it had previously forecast. In line with the layoffs, Twitter closed its offices on Friday and stopped access to all work badges. The departments most affected reportedly include product trust and security, policy, outreach, tweet screening, artificial intelligence ethics, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility and others.
According to emails sent to the fired employees, they will receive one month’s base salary as severance pay, down from the two months’ salary previously promised. Some employees have filed a lawsuit against Twitter, claiming it violated federal and California labor regulations by failing to give sixty days’ notice of mass layoffs, as required by law. However, according to sources cited by reporter Casey Newton, Twitter has since contacted some of the laid-off employees and asked them to return to work.
In addition, Twitter updated its iOS app on June 6 to include a new version of its Twitter Blue subscription service, which has increased in price from $2.99 to $7.99 per month. The only existing feature mentioned in the changelog is access to the Blue Certified logo, a change that Musk had previously requested be developed by the 7th, but was not officially launched and reportedly delayed until after the US midterm elections on the 9th; other “coming soon” features include removing ads, posting longer videos, and prioritizing high-quality content
Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against GitHub Copilot for Infringement
A class action lawsuit has been filed against Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI by developer and attorney Matthew Butterick and his law firm on behalf of GitHub users, alleging that GitHub Copilot features violate the terms of the open source license and infringe on developers’ rights. The lawsuit alleges that Copilot’s features violate U.S. copyright law, GitHub’s terms of service and privacy policy, and California’s consumer privacy laws, and seeks a combined $9 billion in damages from the plaintiffs. Copilot is a new walled garden, scanning open source code to serve Microsoft’s private interests without giving anything back, and will cause significant damage to the open source community.
GitHub Copilot, a programming aid for AI released in June 2022, is based on the OpenAI Codex dataset and has been trained in machine learning using billions of lines of code from open source repositories to convert natural language into code snippets for dozens of programming languages. Since its internal testing last year, Copilot has been widely criticized by the open source community for allegedly violating the open source license’s rules on labeling authors and license terms.
High-Performance Miners Sold at 30% Off as Market Cools
High-performance bitcoin mining machines are selling for about 77 percent less than they did last year, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing data from bitcoin mining service Luxor Technology Corp. The performance of such machines is typically measured using the arithmetic metric terahash; last year, the average cost per 100 terahashes of arithmetic was about $106, while today it has dropped to $24.
According to the analysis, both tech stocks and cryptocurrencies have fallen sharply due to economic conditions such as the Federal Reserve starting to raise interest rates and risky assets becoming less attractive, with the price of bitcoin down about 70% from a year ago. This has led to mining companies becoming insolvent and having to recoup cash through the sale of hardware. For example, Core Scientific, the world’s largest mining company, announced Wednesday that it will not make some pending payments on equipment and financing because it expects to run out of cash by the end of the year, and its stock price has fallen 99 percent to 16 cents over the year. Other companies are selling brand-new, unopened machines. But the total computing power of the Bitcoin network recently hit an all-time high, according to Blockchain.com, suggesting that there are still mining machines coming online and that other miners are filling in the gaps of the original miners.
DALL-E API Open for Public Testing
Recently, DALL-E, the much talked about and controversial artificial intelligence image generation engine, opened its API for public testing, allowing developers to integrate DALL-E directly into applications and services. The API currently has three functions, allowing direct image generation, editing of parts of existing images, or generation of image variants.
The DALL-E API is also subject to OpenAI’s content censorship policy, which prohibits images with hateful, violent, political, fraudulent, or pornographic content. The DALL-E API is also subject to OpenAI’s content censorship policy, which prohibits the output of images with hateful, violent, political, fraudulent, pornographic, etc. content.
According to Bloomberg contributor Mark Gurman, Apple is working on a way to simplify Siri commands by allowing users to activate the voice assistant by simply saying “Siri” instead of “Hey Siri”; the change is expected to roll out next year or in 2024. The difficulty with this improvement is that the pronunciation of the word Siri varies greatly from language to language and dialect to dialect, and having one less syllable than the original will make recognition more difficult.
Specific parameters of the upcoming flagship mobile chips Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen2 and MediaTek Skyguard 9200. Snapdragon 8 Gen2 (SM8550) is said to use TSMC 4nm process and consists of a 3.19GHz X3 core, two 2.8GHz A715 cores, two 2.8GHz A710 and three 2.0GHz A510 cores, with Adreno 740 GPU; the Tiangui 9200 (MTK DX2) also uses TSMC 4nm process The 9200 (MTK DX2) also uses TSMC’s 4nm process and consists of a 3.05GHz X3 core, three 2.85GHz A715 cores and four 2.0GHz A510 cores, with Immortalis-G715 MC11 GPU (Arm’s first GPU to support hardware ray tracing). According to previous news, Snapdragon 8 Gen2 is expected to be released at the Qualcomm 2022 Snapdragon Summit from November 16, with the first model to be launched by the end of the month; the flagship chip of Tiangui 9200 is expected to be released on November 8.
In its job posting for 3D character modelers, Pokémon game developer Creatures Inc. mentions “research and development of next-generation hardware,” indirectly indicating that Nintendo is already preparing new consoles beyond its current lineup, but it is not yet confirmed whether this refers to the previously rumored Switch Pro or other new platforms. Previously, Bloomberg reported that Nintendo is developing a new Switch with 4K DLSS support, and the leaked Nvidia source code also mentions the chip number of what is presumed to be the next-generation Switch.