Specializing in Computer Repair, Networking, Internet Solutions, Web Designing, Hybrid App Designing and Windows Operating systems.
Lizette Chapman / Bloomberg:
Austin has been a top destination for tech workers leaving CA during Covid, and residents are concerned about how the new wave is affecting city's culture — Matthew Congrove got the first offer on his house one month into the pandemic. Now, says Congrove, who lives in an eclectic neighborhood …
Wall Street Journal:
Erroneously unredacted court docs reveal Google ran a secret program called “Project Bernanke” that used past bid data to boost its win rate in ad auctions — Program used past bid data to boost tech giant's win rate in advertising auctions, according to court filing
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
Sources: Sony's PlayStation organization has shifted its development focus to prioritize AAA games at the expense of projects from its niche teams and studios — Sony Corp.'s Visual Arts Service Group has long been the unsung hero of many hit PlayStation video games.
Bloomberg:
Profile of Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, who tweets relentlessly about Miami's merits as a hub for the tech industry, but has a relatively powerless job — The viral moment that turned Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, into a tech recruiter happened on Dec. 4, shortly before 9 p.m. Miami time.
Sarah Manavis / New Statesman:
A look at Tattle Life, a gossip forum where users dox celebrities and influencers, dissect their personal lives, and target them with vicious comments — When the lifestyle influencer Jessie Lethaby - better known as SunbeamsJess - announced she was pregnant in December …
Zeyi Yang / Protocol:
Platforms like Douyin in China have become live online labs where grassroots nationalists and state media collaborate to harass critics at home and abroad — Dozens of companies over the past three years have announced boycotts of Xinjiang cotton given widespread reports of detention …
Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Researchers say Facebook has known for years about exploits similar to the one that used its “contact importer”, enabling the scraping of 533M users' data — Software makers can't catch every bug every time, but Facebook had ample warning about the privacy problems with its “contact import” feature.
Ben Patterson / TechHive:
Logitech to stop making its Harmony line of universal remotes effective immediately, says software and app support will be available for the foreseeable future — Well, the other shoe finally dropped. After years of speculation about the fate of its Harmony line of universal remotes …
Todd Feathers / VICE:
Analysis finds that an OpenCV-based facial recognition model used by exam monitoring software Proctorio fails to recognize Black faces more than 50% of the time — A student researcher has reverse-engineered the controversial exam software—and discovered a tool infamous for failing to recognize non-white faces.
Zoe Schiffer / The Verge:
1,200+ Alphabet employees have signed a letter asking the company to stop protecting harassers, following a NYT op-ed by an ex-employee who alleged harassment — Organizers say the demands of the Google Walkout still haven't been met — More than 500 Alphabet employees have signed …
Sean Endicott / Windows Central:
The White House has asked Congress to approve $150M to fund two new manufacturing plans, including one targeting domestic semiconductor manufacturing — President Biden called for funding to fight the semiconductor shortage in the White House's first budget proposal to Congress today.
Chinese regulators have hit Alibaba with a record fine of 18 billion yuan (about $2.75 billion) for violating anti-monopoly rules as the country seeks to rein in the power of its largest internet conglomerates.
In November, China proposed sweeping antitrust regulations targeting its tech industry. In late December, the State Administration for Market Regulation said it had launched an antitrust probe into Alibaba. SAMR, the country’s top market regulator, said on Saturday it had determined that Alibaba had been “abusing market dominance” since 2015 by forcing its merchants to sell on one of the two main e-commerce sites in China instead of letting them choose freely.
Since late 2020, a clutch of internet giants including Tencent and Alibaba have been hit with fines for violating anti-competition practices. The meager sums of these punishments were symbolic at best compared to the benefits the tech firms reap from their market concentration. No companies have been told to break up their empires and users still have to hop between different super-apps that block each other off.
In recent weeks, however, there are signs that the antitrust campaign is getting more serious. The latest fine on Alibaba is equivalent to 4% of the company’s revenue generated in the calendar year of 2019 in China.
“Today, we received the Administrative Penalty Decision issued by the State Administration for Market Regulation of the People’s Republic of China,” Alibaba said in a statement. “We accept the penalty with sincerity and will ensure our compliance with determination. To serve our responsibility to society, we will operate in accordance with the law with utmost diligence, continue to strengthen our compliance systems and build on growth through innovation.”
The thick walls that tech companies build against each other are starting to break down, too. Alibaba has submitted an application to have its shopping deals app run on WeChat’s mini program platform, Wang Hai, an Alibaba executive, recently confirmed.
For years, Alibaba services have been absent from Tencent’s sprawling lite app ecosystem, which now features millions of third-party services. Vice versa, WeChat is notably missing from Alibaba’s online marketplaces as a payment method. If passed, the WeChat-powered Alibaba mini app would break with precedent of the pair’s long stand-off.
This is a developing story.
Raymond Zhong / New York Times:
China says it is imposing a record $2.8B fine on Alibaba for monopolistic business practices; Alibaba says it will accept the penalty “sincerely” — The penalty is Beijing's toughest action to date in its campaign to tighten supervision of the country's internet Goliaths.
Brian Barrett / Wired:
The FBI arrested a far-right extremist who allegedly plotted to destroy AWS data centers in Virginia with C-4; FBI was tipped off by posts following Jan. 6 riot — The FBI arrested the suspect in Texas after he purchased explosives from an undercover agent.
Practically every film production these days needs some kind of visual effects work, but independent creators often lack the cash or expertise to get that top-shelf CG. Wonder Dynamics, founded by VFX engineer Nikola Todorovic and actor Tye Sheridan, aims to use AI to make some of these processes more accessible for filmmakers with budgets on the tight side, and they’ve just raised $2.5 million to make it happen.
The company has its origins in 2017, after Sheridan and Todorovic met on the set of Rodrigo Garcia’s film Last Days in the Desert. They seem to have both felt that the opportunity was there to democratize the tools that they had access to in big studio films.
Wonder Dynamics is very secretive about what exactly its tools do. Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr saw a limited demo and said he “could see where it will be of value in the area of world creation at modest budgets. The process can be done quickly and at a fraction of a traditional cost structure,” though that leaves us little closer than we started.
Sheridan and Todorovic (who jointly answered questions I sent over) described the system, called Wallace Pro, as taking over some of the grunt work of certain classes of VFX rather than a finishing touch or specific effect.
“We are building an AI platform that will significantly speed up both the production and post-production process for content involving CG characters and digital worlds. The goal of the platform is to reduce the costs associated with these productions by automating the ‘objective’ part of the process, leaving the artists with the creative, ‘subjective’ work,” they said. “By doing this, we hope to create more opportunities and empower filmmakers with visions exceeding their budget. Without saying too much, it can be applied to all three stages of filmmaking (pre-production, production and post-production), depending on the specific need of the artist.”
From this we can take that it’s an improvement to the workflow, reducing the time it takes to achieve some widely used effects, and therefore the money that needs to be set aside for them. To be clear this is distinct from another, more specific product being developed by Wonder Dynamics to create virtual interactive characters as part of the film production process — an early application of the company’s tools, no doubt.
The tech has been in some small scale tests, but the plan is to put it to work in a feature entering production later this year. “Before we release the tech to the public, we want to be very selective with the first filmmakers who use the technology to make sure the films are being produced at a high level,” they said. First impressions do matter.
The $2.5M seed round was led by Founders Fund, Cyan Banister, the Realize Tech Fund, Capital Factory, MaC Venture Capital, and Robert Schwab. “Because we are at the intersection of technology and film, we really wanted to surround ourselves with investment partners who understand how much the two industries will depend on each other in the future,” Sheridan and Todorovic said. “We were extremely fortunate to get MaC Venture Capital and Realize Tech Fund alongside FF. Both funds have a unique combination of Silicon Valley and Hollywood veterans.”
Wonder Dynamics will use the money to, as you might expect, scale its engineering and VFX teams to further develop and expand the product… whatever it is.
With their advisory board, it would be hard to make a mistake without someone calling them on it. “We’re extremely lucky to have some of the most brilliant minds from both the AI and film space,” they said, and that’s no exaggeration. Right now the lineup includes Steven Spielberg and Joe Russo (“obviously geniuses when it comes to film production and innovation”), UC Berkeley and Google’s Angjoo Kanazawa and MIT’s Antonio Torralba (longtime AI researchers in robotics and autonomy), and numerous others in film and finance who “offer us a wealth of knowledge when we’re trying to figure out how to move the company forward.”
AI is deeply integrated into many tech companies and enterprise stacks, making it a solid moneymaker in that industry, but it is still something of a fringe concept in the more creator-driven film and TV world. Yet hybrid production techniques like ILM’s StageCraft, used to film The Mandalorian, are showing how techniques traditionally used for 3D modeling and game creation can be applied safely to film production — sometimes even live on camera. AI is increasingly that part of the world, as pioneers like Nvidia and Adobe have shown, and it seems inevitable that it should come to film — though in exactly what form it’s hard to say.
Pieter Arntz / Malwarebytes Labs:
At Pwn2Own, two Dutch researchers discovered a vulnerability in Zoom that could allow hackers to execute an RCE attack; Zoom says it is working on a fix — Two Dutch white-hat security specialists entered the annual computer hacking contest Pwn2Own, managed to find a Remote Code Execution …
