An app outage that locked numerous rental car customers out of their vehicles is a reminder of the perils of completely relying on apps for basic functionality—especially when those apps have seemingly limited support resources. Zipcar is a car-sharing service that lets customers pay a membership fee to rent vehicles. Users use the Zipcar app to locate cars, unlock and lock them, share images of the vehicle (for proof that…

Turnover at the top of the company isn’t stopping Intel from launching new products: Today the company is announcing the first of its next-generation B-series Intel Arc GPUs, the Arc B580 and Arc B570. Both are decidedly midrange graphics cards that will compete with the likes of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD’s RX 7600 series, but Intel is pricing them competitively: $249 for a B580 with 12GB of RAM…

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is more than just an AI language model with a fancy interface. It’s a system consisting of a stack of AI models and content filters that make sure its outputs don’t embarrass OpenAI or get the company into legal trouble when its bot occasionally makes up potentially harmful facts about people. Recently, that reality made the news when people discovered that the name “David Mayer” breaks ChatGPT. 404…

Companies have been discussing migrating off of VMware since Broadcom’s takeover a year ago led to higher costs and other controversial changes. Now we have an inside look at one of the larger customers that recently made the move. According to a report from The Register today, Beeks Group, a cloud operator headquartered in the United Kingdom, has moved most of its 20,000-plus virtual machines (VMs) off VMware and to…

In a surprise move, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has stepped down as head of the company after less than four years, as reported by Reuters and other outlets. The change caps a chaotic year for Intel, which is poised to report its first annual financial loss since 1986 and announced layoffs of at least 15,000 employees this year as it attempted to cut costs. Intel CFO David Zinsner and Client…

Canadian authorities have arrested a man on suspicion he breached hundreds of accounts belonging to users of cloud storage provider Snowflake and used that access to steal personal data belonging to millions of people, authorities said Tuesday. “Following a request by the United States, Alexander Moucka (aka Connor Moucka) was arrested on a provisional arrest warrant on Wednesday, October 30, 2024,” an official with the Canada Department of Justice wrote…

On Friday, TriStar Pictures released Here, a $50 million Robert Zemeckis-directed film that used real time generative AI face transformation techniques to portray actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright across a 60-year span, marking one of Hollywood’s first full-length features built around AI-powered visual effects. The film adapts a 2014 graphic novel set primarily in a New Jersey living room across multiple time periods. Rather than cast different actors for…

Disposable vapes are indefensible. Many, or maybe most, of them contain rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, but manufacturers prefer to sell new ones. More than 260 million vape batteries are estimated to enter the trash stream every year in the UK alone. Vapers and vape makers are simply leaving an e-waste epidemic to the planet’s future residents to sort out. To make a point about how wasteful this practice is—and to also…

On Friday, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that AI chipmaker Nvidia will replace Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, marking a seismic shift in the semiconductor industry and ending Intel’s 25-year run on the prestigious stock market index. The change takes effect on November 8. “The index changes were initiated to ensure a more representative exposure to the semiconductors industry,” wrote S&P in a press release. Intel’s stock has…

Hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government are using a botnet of thousands of routers, cameras, and other Internet-connected devices to perform highly evasive password spray attacks against users of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, the company warned Thursday. The malicious network, made up almost entirely of TP-Link routers, was first documented in October 2023 by a researcher who named it Botnet-7777. The geographically dispersed collection of more than 16,000…