Welcome to issue #22 of the Dithering Digest Weekly Tech News Roundup.
This week see Apple continuing to make changes in the vain hope of avoiding more litigation (too little too late I think), more cybersecurity nastiness, countries teaming up to tackle the problem that AI may pose and a totally shocking story about floppy disks of all things!
Enjoy the links!
US, UK, Australia and Japan to team up over AI and Quantum risks
The US and UK have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (which sounds like such a corporate BS phrase!) which is an agreement between their AI safety groups. This comes after the Bletchley Declaration during the AI Safety Summit held in late 2023.
“We have always been clear that ensuring the safe development of AI is a shared global issue. Only by working together can we address the technology’s risks head on and harness its enormous potential to help us all live easier and healthier lives. The work of our two nations in driving forward AI safety will strengthen the foundations we laid at Bletchley Park in November, and I have no doubt that our shared expertise will continue to pave the way for countries tapping into AI’s enormous benefits safely and responsibly.”
Additionally, the AUKUS alliance of Australia, UK and US have apparently asked Japan to join their AI and quantum computing efforts.
INC Ransom claims responsibility for UK council cyber incident
INC Ransom have claimed responsibility for the ongoing cyber incident at Leicester City Council and appear to have stolen 3TB worth of data in the attack. They briefly “flashed” the data on a leak site, perhaps to prove they had it, in order to force a payment.
The council appear to be recovering without paying the ransom but details are sparse.
Attacks like this are only going to become more commonplace and incredibly disruptive.
UK businesses behind on cyber security
A report from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology shows that UK business may not be taking security seriously.
Only 22% of businesses had a formal incident response plan in place which has “astounded” experts.
More shocking figures: 68% of organisations didn’t deem the incidents significant enough to even report with many not knowing who to report them to. And 39% of business made NO CHANGES following a breach!
FTC boss appears on the Daily Show - told Apple tried to prevent it
Lina Khan, the boss of the Federal Trade Commission in the US, was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart detailing how they are going after tech giants like Amazon, Facebook and others over their monopolistic practices.
Stewart told her during the interview that when he has his podcast series with Apple, he wanted to have her on but Apple blocked it. Not a good look for Apple given their current investigations for being monopolistic!
Apple relaxes guidelines to allow Game Emulators
Apple have changed their App Store rules to allow Game Emulators. Don’t be jumping for joy just yet. While you can download a Nintendo emulator, the app is responsible for ensuring that no copyright infringement takes place so you will not be able to easily load in ROMs of all your favourites.
Allowing streaming games is also a big deal, opening up things like NVIDIA Geforce Now and XBOX GamePass.
San Francisco still using 5.25 inch floppies and will until 2030
I had to read this headline twice to fully understand. The fact they still use these disks shocked me, and then on the second reading I realised they plan to continue for ANOTHER 6 YEARS!
The floppies are used to load the software that runs the central servers. They started to plan the move away from floppies in 2018 and expected it to take a decade.
And I thought the government was slow to move!
Computer Joke of the Week
How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? None, it’s a hardware problem!
If you have any cool projects or tinkering you are doing, let us know and we will feature it in future issues of the digest. I would love to hear what you are all dithering on!
Until next week, happy dithering!
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