{"id":29059,"date":"2024-09-18T09:30:27","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T13:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=29059"},"modified":"2024-09-18T09:30:27","modified_gmt":"2024-09-18T13:30:27","slug":"ransomware-attacks-reach-new-high-microsoft-google-to-tag-ai-generated-images-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/ransomware-attacks-reach-new-high-microsoft-google-to-tag-ai-generated-images-and-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Ransomware Attacks Reach New High; Microsoft &#038; BlackRock Raise $100B for AI: The End of The Party? Tupperware Files for Bankruptcy; Google to Tag AI-Generated Images&#8230; and more!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24pt;\"><strong>Ransomware Attacks Reach New High; Microsoft &amp; BlackRock Raise $100B for AI<\/strong><\/span><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24pt;\"><strong>:<\/strong><\/span><strong><span style=\"font-size: 24pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\"> The End of The Party? Tupperware Files for Bankruptcy; Google to Tag AI-Generated Images<\/span><\/strong><strong><span style=\"font-size: 24pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">&#8230; and more!<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">Every day we scan the tech world for interesting news in the world of technology and sometimes from outside the world of technology. Every Wednesday, we feature news articles that grabbed our attention over the past week. We hope you find this week&#8217;s\u00a0 &#8216;Wednesday Newsbytes&#8217; informative and interesting!<\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.techradar.com\/pro\/ransomware-attacks-are-soaring-to-a-new-high\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong><span style=\"font-size: 24pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">Ransomware attacks are soaring to a new high<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 24pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">Ransomware activity rose again in the second quarter of 2024<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">New analysis from Symantec has revealed a significant increase in the number of ransomware attacks in the second quarter of 2024.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">The company&#8217;s figures claimed criminal groups claimed 1,310 attacks during the period, a 36% increase from the previous quarter, and close to the all-time high of 1,488 attacks recorded in Q3 2023.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">\u201cThe sharp increase in attacks in the second quarter of this year suggests that momentum is once again with attackers,\u201d the report states. \u201cWhile high-profile ransomware operations such as Noberus shut down, the pool of skilled affiliates appears to be undisturbed and many appear to simply migrate to alternative franchises.\u201c<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"font-size: 18pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">A new wave &#8211; with some old names<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">Symantec&#8217;s report suggests the disruption of Lockbit, the largest ransomware as a service (RaaS) provider earlier this year, led to a dramatic decrease in ransomware attacks for the first quarter of 2024, but the latest reports show cyber criminals have bounced back..<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.techradar.com\/pro\/ransomware-attacks-are-soaring-to-a-new-high\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\"><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\">Read more at <\/span><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\">TechRadar Pro.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ibtimes.com\/microsoft-blackrock-join-hands-raise-100-billion-ai-data-centers-3743711\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\"><strong><span style=\"font-size: 24pt;\">Microsoft, BlackRock join hands to raise $100 billion for AI data centers<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">Microsoft and BlackRock have partnered to amass $100 billion in funds for the development and expansion of data centers to support AI growth and the energy infrastructure needed to power these facilities.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">According to a press release, the companies are part of the Global Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Investment Partnership, or GAIIP, that seeks to address the growing demand for AI-powered data centers and sustainable energy infrastructure.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">The partnership also includes Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), an infrastructure investor soon to be part of BlackRock, and MGX, a tech investor in the United Arab Emirates.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">With financial heavyweights and industry experts under one roof, GAIIP seeks to plug the funding gap for AI infrastructure development with an initial target of $30 billion in private equity capital and a long-term goal of $100 billion, according to the statement&#8230;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ibtimes.com\/microsoft-blackrock-join-hands-raise-100-billion-ai-data-centers-3743711\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\"><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\"><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\">Read More at International Business Times.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/nordot.app\/1209099412232421429\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-size: 24pt;\"><strong><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">End of the party? Tupperware files for bankruptcy<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">Tupperware Brands and some of its subsidiaries have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and are seeking a buyer, the food container firm said, after years of dwindling sales.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">&#8220;Over the last several years, the Company&#8217;s financial position has been severely impacted by the challenging macroeconomic environment,&#8221; president and CEO Laurie Ann Goldman said in a statement Tuesday announcing the bankruptcy filing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">&#8220;As a result, we explored numerous strategic options and determined this is the best path forward,&#8221; added Goldman.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">The company said it would seek court approval for a sale process for the business to protect its brand and &#8220;further advance Tupperware&#8217;s transformation into a digital-first, technology-led company.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">The Orlando, Florida-based firm said it would also seek approval to continue operating during the bankruptcy proceedings and would continue to pay its employees and suppliers&#8230;.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/nordot.app\/1209099412232421429\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-size: 18pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">Read more at Nordot<\/span><\/strong><\/span><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.techradar.com\/computing\/artificial-intelligence\/ai-generated-and-edited-images-will-soon-be-labeled-in-google-search-results\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong><span style=\"font-size: 24pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">AI-generated and edited images will soon be labeled in Google Search results<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 24pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">Google is finally doing something about AI images, but it&#8217;s not quite enough<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">Google has announced that it will begin rolling out a new feature to help users &#8220;better understand how a particular piece of content was created and modified&#8221;.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">This comes after the company joined the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) \u2013 a group of major brands trying to combat the spread of misleading information online \u2013 and helped develop the latest Content Credentials standard. Amazon, Adobe and Microsoft are also committee members.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">Set to release over the coming months, Google says it will use the current Content Credentials guidelines \u2013 aka an image\u2019s metadata \u2013 within its Search parameters to add a label to images that are AI-generated or edited, providing more transparency for users. This metadata includes information like the origin of the image, as well as when, where and how it was created.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">However, the C2PA standard, which gives users the ability to trace the origin of different media types, has been declined by many AI developers like Black Forrest Labs \u2014 the company behind the Flux model that X&#8217;s (formerly Twitter) Grok uses for image generation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">This AI-flagging will be implemented through Google&#8217;s current About This Image window&#8230;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.techradar.com\/computing\/artificial-intelligence\/ai-generated-and-edited-images-will-soon-be-labeled-in-google-search-results\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\"><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\">Read more at TechRadar<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\"><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\"><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tomshardware.com\/networking\/halow-wi-fi-has-now-been-tested-at-99-miles-new-wi-fi-world-record-is-a-near-5x-increase-over-previous-best\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong><span style=\"font-size: 24pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">HaLow Wi-Fi has now been tested at 9.9 miles \u2014 new Wi-Fi world record is a near 5X increase over previous best<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 18pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">Morse Micro returns with yet another promising HaLow demonstration.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">Back in January, Morse Micro achieved a world record of WiFi range using the HaLow (802.11ah) standard, by conducting a video call over a distance of 1.8 miles through a high-interference San Francisco beach area and proving it worked\u2014 and now, in the rural Joshua Tree National Park, they&#8217;ve broken the world record again, almost five times over, with a distance of 9.9 miles, or 15.9 kilometers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">The connection speed of the earlier San Francisco beach test ranged from 11 Megabits per second at 500 meters to just a single Megabit per second at then-maximum 1.8 mile range. Meanwhile, the throughput of HaLow in this new testing topped out at 2 Megabits per second at 9.9 miles \u2014 likely a best-case scenario considering how little interference there is in a rural area like Joshua Tree National Park compared to a place as densely-populated as a San Francisco beach.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">As noted by Morse Micro in their video, this seems to correspond to the theoretical maximum HaLow range of 15.9 kilometers \u2014 and starts making HaLow seem a lot more sensible for outdoor work including farming without needing to rely on expensive cellular data or poor cellular coverage&#8230;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tomshardware.com\/networking\/halow-wi-fi-has-now-been-tested-at-99-miles-new-wi-fi-world-record-is-a-near-5x-increase-over-previous-best\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-size: 18pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\"><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Read more at Tom&#8217;s Hardware.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt; color: #0000ff;\"><strong><em>Thanks for reading this week&#8217;s Wednesday Newbytes. We hope these articles were informative, interesting, fun, and helpful. Darcy &amp; TC<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thundercloud.net\/donation.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"https:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/images\/2017\/goodfight2017.png\" alt=\"Help us help you!\" width=\"573\" height=\"136\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Ransomware Attacks Reach New High; Microsoft &amp; BlackRock Raise $100B for AI: The End of The Party? Tupperware Files for Bankruptcy; Google to Tag AI-Generated Images&#8230; and more! Every day we scan the tech world for interesting news in the world of technology and sometimes from outside the world of technology. Every Wednesday, we feature news articles\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/ransomware-attacks-reach-new-high-microsoft-google-to-tag-ai-generated-images-and-more\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23363,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4421,4448,4484,2247,1678,2509,1,1426,1682,1674,4372,2145],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29059"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29059"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29060,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29059\/revisions\/29060"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}