This is You on Smiles. We All Have Photographic Memories Now →
We’ve ceded many of our remembering duties (birthdays, schedules, phone numbers, directions) to a hard drive in the cloud. And to a large extent, we’ve now handed over our memories of experiences to digital cameras.
How Democracies Must Compete with Digital Authoritarians →
Artificial intelligence (AI) may still hold the potential to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems [...], but when it comes to risks to privacy and civil liberties, AI already has been a game changer in favor of authoritarian states. AI-enabled tools have turbocharged every pre-existing form of repression including: mass and targeted surveillance, censorship, and the spread of propaganda.
Retired Ambassador Eileen Donahoe outlines that democratic nations must:
- Develop and showcase a democratic model of digital restraint at home
- Exercise leadership in international tech diplomacy and standard setting
- Invest in tech innovation as a means of advancing democratic values
Offense will win some battles, but cyber defense will win the war →
Changing the calculus on defense remains the most important way to prevent attacks, even if it is not as attention-grabbing as offensive efforts.
The wonder material graphene may have found its killer app →
[G]raphene remains largely unemployed. Certainly, no killer application of the sort predicted when the stuff was discovered has emerged. But that could be about to change. Concrete is [...] an important material and of great concern to those attempting to slow down global warming, because the process of making it inevitably releases carbon dioxide. And graphene may hold the key to reducing that contribution considerably.
The 10-Year-Old Tweet That Still Defines the Internet →
[T]he best-known @Horse_ebooks tweet, posted 10 years ago today, was astounding in its clarity and salience. It described both the internet and our entire human world. "Everything happens so much," @Horse_ebooks tweeted on June 28, 2012.
EvilSln: A New Exploitation Technique for Visual Studio Projects →
Running arbitrary code from the Internet is a well-known risk, but did you know opening it might be?
Using logs to build a solid data infrastructure (or: why dual writes are a bad idea) →
Say you have this tangle of different datastores, caches and indexes that need to be kept in sync with each other. Now that we have seen a bunch of examples of practical applications of logs, can we use what we’ve learnt to figure out how to build these systems in a better way?
Wonderful photo from Daniel Dencescu recognized as "Highly Commended" by the UK Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.
Thanksgiving 2023 security incident →
Even though we believed, and later confirmed, the attacker had limited access, we undertook a comprehensive effort to rotate every production credential (more than 5,000 individual credentials), physically segment test and staging systems, performed forensic triages on 4,893 systems, reimaged and rebooted every machine in our global network including all the systems the threat actor accessed and all Atlassian products (Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket).
This should be considered the gold standard for the response to and write-up on a security incident.
OpenAI collapses media reality with Sora, a photorealistic AI video generator →
On Thursday, OpenAI announced Sora, a text-to-video AI model that can generate 60-second-long photorealistic HD video from written descriptions. While it's only a research preview that we have not tested, it reportedly creates synthetic video (but not audio yet) at a fidelity and consistency greater than any text-to-video model available at the moment.