Agregátor RSS
Kvůli červnové aktualizaci Windows 11 se někdy nespouští Office a Koš zapomíná názvy souborů
WhatsApp is Finally Getting Usernames to Help Keep Phone Numbers Private
WhatsApp is Finally Getting Usernames to Help Keep Phone Numbers Private
Synology a Qnap mají novou konkurenci. Xiaomi vyrobilo svůj první NAS
Malicious Perplexity Chrome Extension Intercepted Searches and Address Bar Input
Malicious Perplexity Chrome Extension Intercepted Searches and Address Bar Input
Apple’s memory problem is your problem, too
Apple’s ongoing problems with RAM shortages and higher prices won’t be solved anytime soon, because rapidly accelerating demand for high-end AI memory is devouring the consumer electronics industry.
GoPro has already warned it might go out of business — and the scale of the crunch has prompted analysts to call it an “absolute existential crisis” for smaller tech firms.
An endless nightThe whole issue might get worse. Noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes the supply/demand crisis will deepen through 2027. He expects up to 20% of the remaining memory manufacturing capacity currently going to consumer electronics could be diverted to feed data centers in the coming year. That’s a message of doom to smaller firms, and the Android market will be eaten up.
It’s lazy thinking to see Apple as a villain in this scenario. The company might have been charging more for add-on memory than market rates, but there were real technical reasons to do so. And while critics might be castigating Cupertino for those past practices, they’ll still find themselves now paying more for whatever brand of electronic devices they use to write their screeds on in future.
It’s all about supply and demand. Memory manufacturers see the opportunity to feed AI need, even if it means sacrificing consumer markets as they do.
Cash through chaosYou can argue that the consequences of that decision are unethical. Should memory makers have considered the consequence of curtailed supply on their existing markets? After all, every business, every school, and almost every consumer is now a digital entity, and the massive increase in PC, smartphone, and other consumer electronics prices will have a consequential impact across all layers of society.
It generates yet another inflationary pressure (as if more is needed) on the global economy, and the decision to further limit supply of consumer electronics memory could be seen as corporate irresponsibility. That’s partly why a class action against the big three memory makers (Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron) has been filed in California. Between them, those three firms control around 90% of global memory supply, giving the trio colossal market power.
It’s a real power imbalance.
This is market powerGoPro is typical; as a smaller vendor, there isn’t much it can do to save itself. Apple has more clout, so it might be able to forge a way forward. But even then, it’s rowing against what CEO Tim Cook has already called “a hundred-year flood.”
So even if the company can convince the Trump Administration to let it secure memory from currently embargoed Chinese manufacturer ChangXin Memory Technologies, the move is unlikely to ease the pressure much at all. “Tim Cook is one of the few tech leaders who can still navigate both Washington and Beijing, so this is better handled before he steps down as CEO,” wrote Ming-Chi Kuo. That’s true, though Cook will continue “engaging with policy makers” once he takes on his new role as executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors in September.
Apple will likely also be speaking with partners to explore the possibility of investing in additional fabrication plants together (or building its own, given it has its own stable of experts quite capable of doing so). But even if those talks come to something, it will be years before they enter operation. Sadly, manufacturing investment from the existing big memory firms seems focused on data centers.
The shortage will continue until morale improvesWhat happens now? Short of any direct intervention to change the situation, memory prices will continue to accelerate. Jefferies Equity Research warns they will rise up to 50% in Q3 and an additional 30% to 40% by the end of 2026. They’ll also continue to increase next year, by which time some new production capacity might begin to come on stream.
The scale of these price increases means no one can know whether Apple’s most recent product price increases (and the looming iPhone price increases in fall) will cover the full extent of the anticipated memory price hike.
Will we see prices fall if memory price inflation eases off? History says we’re unlikely to see AI-flation go in reverse, but it’s not completely impossible. Meanwhile, businesses everywhere will struggle with unexpected hardware cost increases that are impossible to plan for. You can also anticipate some smaller vendors exiting the market, leaving companies who might have deployed those products across their business exposed, as software updates and hardware repairs will cease.
Yes, AI has already changed the world – it’s more expensiveThey told us AI would change the world. It appears to be doing so by making everything more expensive.
While there will still be opportunity to generate cash through this chaos, it’s far from delivering the kind of stable, business-friendly environment most governments rely on to balance their books. In the end, all of this calls to mind the 2002 DRAM price fixing scandal, the only difference being that the consequences are much greater in this digital-everything age.
Please join me on social media at BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon, and do subscribe my daily human-curated Apple news headline summary on Substack.
Apple Patches 30+ iOS, macOS, Safari Flaws, Including AI-Discovered WebKit Bugs
Apple Patches 30+ iOS, macOS, Safari Flaws, Including AI-Discovered WebKit Bugs
U.S. offers $10 million for hackers targeting WhatsApp, Signal users
Mustang Panda Uses Zoho WorkDrive as Command Channel in Indian Government Attacks
Mustang Panda Uses Zoho WorkDrive as Command Channel in Indian Government Attacks
⚡ Weekly Recap: Linux Kernel Flaws, AI Malware Tricks, Turla Backdoor, Infostealers and More
⚡ Weekly Recap: Linux Kernel Flaws, AI Malware Tricks, Turla Backdoor, Infostealers and More
Linux Foundation Launches Akrites to Strengthen Software Supply Chain Security
Agentic AI Has an Identity Problem and Attackers Know It
Critical SimpleHelp flaw exploited to deploy new stealer malware
Forget Code: AI Is Learning to Hack Society
Let loose on existing regulations, AI models sniffed out known loopholes—and exposed entirely new ones too.
AI’s hacking skills are big news at the moment, but finding vulnerabilities in code may be the least of our worries. A new study suggests AI models can discover potentially damaging loopholes in the rules and regulations underpinning society.
Modern AI systems are powerful optimizers. Give them a goal, and they’ll pursue it relentlessly, quickly discovering solutions that would take a human years to find. But they are also incredibly literal in the way they approach a problem. They will do exactly what you tell them and are incapable of reading between the lines in the ways a human would.
This tendency leads to a recurring problem known as “reward hacking,” where an AI finds some loophole to maximize its performance on the metric used to measure success without actually achieving what its designers intended. The classic example is the AI that discovered it could win a boat racing videogame by looping around in circles collecting power-ups rather than completing the course.
The problem is partly due to humans being bad at specifying their goals. And unfortunately, it seems this weakness exists in the rules and regulations used to run society. When researchers let popular large language models loose in 72 simulated regulatory environments, the models found 60 percent of known loopholes and even identified some entirely new exploits.
“Within these environments, reward hacking naturally emerges and leads to regulatory loophole discovery,” the authors write in a non-peer-reviewed paper published on arXiv. “Models learn to hack the social rules and generate strategies that remain technically compliant while defeating regulatory intent.”
The regulatory environments the researchers created were primarily based on rules governing things like pharmaceutical patents, NBA salary caps, and deep-sea mining. In each case, Alibaba’s Qwen3 model was given the relevant rules, an explanation of its task, a predefined set of actions it could take, and the system used to score different outcomes.
A more powerful model, Google’s Gemini-3-flash, then simulated the consequences of different actions Qwen3 took and judged if and when it had found a way to exploit the rules of the game. When that occurred, the larger model patched the loophole by adding new rules, and the smaller model was set loose again. Over many iterations, the models to discover increasingly subtle workarounds.
When building their regulatory environments, the researchers omitted real-world fixes that regulators had used to close known loopholes. Over many trials, Qwen3 rediscovered more than 60 percent of these exploits. In a simulation of pharmaceutical patent regulations, the two models ended up replaying the same sequence of loophole discovery and regulatory reform that occurred in the real world.
Crucially, their behavior emerged spontaneously without the researchers asking the algorithms to cheat the system. This is a byproduct of the popular reinforcement learning approach the researchers used, where a model is rewarded for getting closer to a specific, numerically-defined goal.
Worryingly, the team found that existing safety measures offered little protection. Both models are designed to refuse prompts featuring harmful language, but loophole-seeking behavior slipped under the radar. When asked to self-critique their own behavior, the models identified fewer than 40 percent of their own exploits.
The researchers note that the same capabilities could be used more proactively to scour proposed regulations for loopholes before enactment. But lead author Wei Liu, a PhD student at King’s College London, says there are always likely to be gaps. “In the real world,” he told Science, “society is a huge, complicated reward function that can’t ever be patched to a perfect status.”
Adding to the concern, the models used in this study were far from the frontier, suggesting that more powerful AI could be even more adept at regulatory hacking. Whether our existing institutions can adapt quickly enough to this emerging threat is an open question.
The post Forget Code: AI Is Learning to Hack Society appeared first on SingularityHub.
Hackers now exploit critical Oracle E-Business flaw in attacks
- « první
- ‹ předchozí
- …
- 76
- 77
- 78
- 79
- 80
- 81
- 82
- 83
- 84
- …
- následující ›
- poslední »



