US financial institutions spent nearly $1.2 billion on likely ransomware-related payments last year, most commonly in response to breaches originating with Russian criminal groups, according to the Treasury Department. The payments more than doubled from 2020, underscoring the pernicious damage that ransomware continues to wreak on the private sector. The Read more…
Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously; and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously. — Booth Tarkington
Google’s rolling out a handful of new shopping features that should make it easier to find good deals directly from search. When you search for a product, Google will now surface results with coupon codes that you can copy and paste during checkout. From a report: Any products with a Read more…
Google Hangouts is scheduled for death today. The phone app has been individually booting people off the service since July, but the last vestiges of Hangouts, the web app, will be shut down today. From a report: For a brief period, Hangouts was Google’s best, most ambitious, most popular messaging Read more…
A freelance is one who gets paid by the word — per piece or perhaps. — Robert Benchley
A new art exhibition in San Francisco showcases some of the unique ways that artists have begun to incorporate Dall-E 2, GPT-3 and other AI systems into their work — efforts that go well beyond just typing some text and seeing what pops out. The exhibit, “Artificial Imagination,” comes amid Read more…
Today ProPublica published “the largest-ever analysis of Google’s ad practices on non-English-language websites,” saying their report shows Google “is funneling revenue to some of the web’s most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa,” and “reveals how the tech giant makes disinformation profitable….” The company has Read more…