UK rolls back controversial encryption rules of Online Safety Bill

The UK government has conceded one of the more controversial parts of its Online Safety Bill, stating that the powers granted by the legislation will not be used to scan encrypted messaging apps for harmful content until it can be done in a targeted manner.

Companies will not be required to scan encrypted messages until it is “technically feasible and where technology has been accredited as meeting minimum standards of accuracy in detecting only child sexual abuse and exploitation content,” said Stephen Parkinson, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Arts and Heritage, in a planned statement during the bill’s third reading in the House of Lords on Wednesday afternoon.

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China bans chip maker Micron from key infrastructure projects

Credit to Author: avenkat@idg.com| Date: Mon, 22 May 2023 05:42:00 -0700

A network security review of Micron products sold in China has revealed that these products pose a significant security risk to the country’s key information infrastructure supply chain, according to the Cyberspace Affairs Commission of China.

Micron is a US memory chip giant that produces computer memory and computer data storage including dynamic random-access memory, flash memory, and USB flash drives. The Chinese authorities have not mentioned which Micron products are banned, what kind of security risk they pose, nor what would happen to existing Micron products that are already in use.

“The review found that Micron’s products have more serious cybersecurity problems and pose significant security risks to China’s critical information infrastructure supply chain, affecting China’s national security,” according to a machine translation of a Cyberspace Affairs Commission of China statement.

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Senate hearings see a clear and present danger from AI — and opportunities

There are vital national interests in advancing artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline public services and automate mundane tasks performed by government employees. But the government lacks in both IT talent and systems to support those efforts.

“The federal government as a whole continues to face barriers in hiring, managing, and retaining staff with advanced technical skills — the very skills needed to design, develop, deploy, and monitor AI systems,” said Taka Ariga, chief data scientist at the US Government Accountability Office.

Daniel Ho, associate director for Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) at Stanford University, agreed, saying that by one estimate the federal government would need to hire about 40,000 IT workers to address cybersecurity issues posed by AI.

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IT staffers would help colleagues avoid monitoring software

The use of invasive monitoring software that tracks employee productivity is unlikely to be popular with workers — and it turns out IT staffers aren’t keen on deploying the technology either.

In fact, many IT workers are apparently willing to defy company policy and help colleagues find workarounds to avoid being spied on by the boss. That’s according to a survey of 500 IT managers and 500 non-manager IT workers in the US conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of digital employee experience software vendor 1E. The survey results were made public last week. 

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Three issues with generative AI still need to be solved

Disclosure: Qualcomm and Microsoft are clients of the author.

Generative AI is spreading like a virus across the tech landscape. It’s gone from being virtually unheard a year ago to being one of, if not the, top trending technology today. As with any technology, there are issues that tend to surface with rapid growth, and generative AI is no exception.

I expect three main problems to emerge before the end of the year that few people are talking about today.

The critical need for a hybrid solution

Generative AI uses massive language models, it’s processor-intensive, and it’s rapidly becoming as ubiquitous as browsers. This is a problem because existing, centralized datacenters aren’t structured to handle this kind of load. They are I/O-constrained, processor-constrained, database-constrained, cost-constrained, and size-constrained, making a massive increase in centralized capacity unlikely in the near term, even though the need for this capacity is going vertical. 

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China to probe Micron over cybersecurity, in chip war’s latest battle

The Chinese government is instituting a cybersecurity review of US-based memory chip maker Micron’s products being sold in the country, in the latest move in the ongoing semiconductor trade dispute that pits China against the US and its allies.

The rupture between China and the West over semiconductors is causing chip supply chain disruptions that threaten many of the fastest-growing parts of the technology sector – mainly AI and cloud technology. The chip war is also putting global enterprises in the crosshairs, as auto manufacturing and a host of other sectors are increasingly dependent on the availability of advanced silicon for growth.

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The top 12 tech stories of 2022

The technology sector’s vulnerability to the vagaries of geopolitics and the macroeconomy became clearer than ever in 2022, as IT giants laid off workers en masse, regulators cracked down on tech rule-breakers, nations negotiated data privacy, the EU-China chip war widened, and the Ukraine war disrupted business as usual. Through it all the classic tech themes—including innovation and the fight to bolster cybersecurity—continued as ChatGPT was released, Broadcom sought to purchase VMWare, a Mac renaissance began to flower, and teen hackers brought major companies to their knees. Here are our editors’ choices for the dozen stories that rocked the world of tech in 2022.

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Is performance tracking about to go mobile?

Productivity and performance tracking have been on the rise since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to remote and hybrid work. Now, as pandemic restrictions recede and more traditional work habits reemerge, it’s inevitable some organizations will want to extend tracking beyond the company PC to mobile devices.

That means IT could soon be involved in selecting, implementing, and supporting productivity and performance monitoring solutions that keep tabs on workers wherever they are — even if they’re not sitting in front of a computer.

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