Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent Alphabet, is urging the U.S. government to step up innovation and more actively police cyberthreats. In a year beset with security breaches attributed to Russian and Chinese hackers, Pichai says it’s time to draft a Geneva Convention for technology, outlining international legal standards, safeguards and behavioral norms for the connected age. Pichai also made an appeal for state-sponsored innovation in the face of competition from China, where the Communist Party under President Xi Jinping has outlined plans to advance artificial intelligence and develop a proprietary semiconductor sector. Continue reading Alphabet CEO Calls for Government Action in Tech Innovation

Although Facebook leadership has suggested that artificial intelligence will solve the company’s challenge to keep hate speech and violent content at bay, AI may not be a thoroughly effective near-term solution. That evaluation comes as part of a new examination of internal Facebook documents that allegedly indicate the social media company removes only a small percentage — quantified as low-single-digits — of posts deemed to violate its hate-speech rules. Algorithmic uncertainty as to whether content violates the rules results only in that it is fed to users less frequently, rather than flagged for further scrutiny. Continue reading Facebook Said to Inflate AI Takedown Rates for Hate Speech

University of Southern California students were invited to participate in the second of two scheduled Metaverse Experience Challenges, hosted by ETC@USC. Making use of current and emerging tools, students were tasked with developing original ideas for compelling metaverse experiences. Ten teams started work at 1:00 pm on Friday, October 8 and presented their ideas to judges from Epic Games, Universal Pictures, Disney Studios, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud at 3:00 pm on Saturday, October 9. Each member of the winning teams — MetaversEdu and MetaMall — received a Nintendo Switch “Fortnite” Edition, courtesy of Epic Games. Continue reading USC Students Compete in Second ETC Metaverse Challenge

Payments flagged by U.S. banks as suspected ransomware in 2021 are on pace to nearly double those of 2020, according to reports filed with the Treasury Department. Almost $600 million in potential ransomware payments have been filed with the federal government from January through June, which is more than 40 percent more than the tally for full-year 2020. Reflecting the fact that governments worldwide describe cybercrime as a critical national security threat, the first International Cybersecurity Challenge is scheduled for Greece in June 2022, where 25 Americans aged 18 to 26 are set to compete. Continue reading U.S. Advances Cybersecurity Steps as Ransomware Doubles

Introduced in select markets a little more than a year ago and rolled out globally in July, YouTube Shorts generated more than 15 billion daily views worldwide by late September (up from 6.5 billion daily views worldwide in March), according to YouTube parent Google. The format caps videos at 60-seconds and is designed to rival TikTok, which claims 1 billion active monthly users, putting it among the most rapid-growth platforms ever. Even with YouTube Shorts’ healthy growth, the company has just begun testing advertising and monetization approaches for the short-form video experience. Continue reading Google Imagines Future Business Model for YouTube Shorts

New chip factories are springing up worldwide to meet a historic shortage of semiconductors. The effort to increase output to meet chip demand in everything from computers to cars to smart TVs includes a new $12 billion plant located in Arizona for the world’s largest wholesale chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSMC’s Arizona plant is scheduled to begin producing advanced 5nm chips by 2024. And as part of its commitment to spend $100 billion over three years to increase production, TSMC just announced plans to build a new manufacturing facility in Japan. Continue reading Surging Chip Demand Spurs TSMC Plants in U.S. and Japan

An international move to eliminate digital-service taxes has gained momentum on news of an agreement between the U.S. and five European countries with whom it was polarized in its fight to retire the digital tax. Such taxes affect Big Tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. In all, 136 countries agreed to retool international corporate taxation at last week’s Fourth G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting in Washington, D.C. The deal immediately bans adding any new digital taxes, although the timing to implement reversal of existing taxes remains unclear. Continue reading U.S. and Five European Nations Strike Deal on Digital Taxes

By the end of 2021, cybercrime will cost the world an estimated $6 trillion through 2021, a figure that will swell to $10.5 trillion by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. To deal with that threat, Google has created the Cybersecurity Action Team (GCAT) and the Work Safer security bundle to help protect organizations, small businesses, enterprises and public sector institutions against cyberattacks. At Google Cloud Next ’21, the company said the Google Cybersecurity Action Team will draw on expertise from across the company to help protect entities from data breaches and help meet new government compliance rules. Continue reading Google Action Team Is Ready for Its Cybersecurity Close-Up

LinkedIn will shut down its platform in China by the end of the year, the result of “a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements.” The Microsoft-owned company says it plans to offer a new app for China that focuses exclusively on job postings. Gone will be the social networking features that helped make LinkedIn a success in the U.S. and elsewhere. China’s Internet is monitored by a system of censorship filters called “the Great Firewall,” making it difficult for free expression platforms to do business there. Continue reading Microsoft Closing LinkedIn in China, Retooling for Jobs-Only

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are poised to revolutionize the dubbing process for media content, optimizing it for a more natural effect as part of an emerging movement called “auto-dubbing.” AI has impacted the way U.S. audiences are experiencing the Netflix breakout “Squid Game” and other foreign content, as well as helping U.S. programming play better abroad. Its impact is in its nascency. Soon, replacing rubber-lip syndrome with AI-enhanced visuals that enable language translation at the click of a button may become the industry norm.  Continue reading AI-Powered Auto-Dubbing May Soon Become Industry Norm

Surveys indicate the continued acceptance of Connected TV with advertisers, programmers and viewers, making it the fastest growing advertising platform. While this has largely been the result of housebound audiences during the pandemic, future growth is projected to be strong. A Leichtman Research Group survey shows more than 80 percent of TV households possessing at least one connected TV device (higher penetration than cable TV), which translates to 4.1 devices per CTV household. Study results also reveal that 39 percent of adults watch streaming video daily, with 60 percent streaming weekly. Continue reading Streaming Surge Makes CTV Video Top Ad Growth Platform

On the heels of several successful tests that included Tokyo 2020 Olympics telecasts in Brazil and Japan, Intel is moving full steam ahead to bring live, end-to-end 8K HDR streaming to audiences across the globe. The company sees the future of 8K HDR as revolutionizing the worlds of sports, entertainment and gaming by delivering spectacular, immersive events at stadium scale, augmented by 3D, VR, AR and UHD audio. The key to this brave new broadcast world is Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors for local encoding and delivery over-the-top. And of course, the slickest compression algorithms. Continue reading Intel’s 8K HDR Live Streams ‘Way Beyond Proof of Concept’

The expense of building and maintaining customized client servers is driving enterprise clients to the cloud, a particularly attractive destination for those building new wireless networks for mobile smart devices. Dish and Japan’s Rakuten Group online retailer are two enterprise businesses buying into these “virtualized networks,” generally believed to offer cost efficiencies, with little to no diminishment of service (and potentially improvement). Processing resources can be allocated to locations where traffic surges and traffic can be easily shifted from one server to another in the case of technical failure. Continue reading Emerging Wireless Networks Turn to the Cloud, Virtualization

U.S. lawmakers agitated by the recent testimony of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and related media reports are homing in on the social network’s News Feed algorithm as ripe for regulation, although First Amendment questions loom. The past year has seen Congress introduce or reintroduce no fewer than five bills that expressly focus on software coding that decides who sees what content on social media platforms. In addition to the U.S., laws advancing the idea of regulating such algorithms are gaining momentum in the European Union, Britain and China. Continue reading Lawmakers See Solution in Regulating Facebook’s Algorithm

Google Intelligent Products Essentials is a new integrated solution designed to help enterprise clients quickly get hardware products online with a distributed Internet of Things. Intelligent Products Essentials aggregates critical components to launch distributed IoT and edge computing solutions. Essentially turn-key, Essentials does require a third-party system integrator to implement the system. As with other new offerings unveiled this week at the Google Cloud Next virtual event, Essentials is underpinned by analytics tools and designed to help organizations mine value from data for new and existing products. Continue reading Google Debuts Enterprise IoT Essentials, New Analytics Apps