Good morning. We’re almost to the end of the week. Let’s get into the tech news.
1. Fighting deepfakes with new laws
New laws are being introduced in Australia to ban sharing non-consensual deepfakes that are sexually explicit.
According to Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, the new law, brought in as The Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024, is designed to impose criminal penalties of up to six years imprisonment for sharing such material. If the person also created the material, a higher penalty of seven years imprisonment is present under the laws.
“This insidious behaviour can be a method of degrading, humiliating and dehumanising victims. Such acts are overwhelmingly targeted towards women and girls, perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes and contributing to gender-based violence,” the Attorney-General said.
2. Nvidia shoots past Apple’s value
Following announcements for new AI chips made at Computex, Nvidia is now the highest-valued company in the world, pushing past Apple for the first time. Per The Verge, This morning and the afternoon in the U.S., Nvidia pushed to a whopping $3.01 trillion, up from Apple’s $3 trillion.
Nvidia has no doubt seen the greatest success on the stock market from the AI boom, in which it is basically selling shovels in a gold rush. Nvidia’s AI chips underpin the large language models and generative AI that every company appears to be pushing. That being said, competitors AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm appear to be catching up.
The company now plans to unveil a new AI chip on a yearly basis.
3. Club Penguin got hacked?
A Disney Confluence server has been hacked by a group of Club Penguin fans, hoping to steal information about the game. Per Bleeping Computer, the group managed to get away with 2.5GB of internal corporate data. The group posted a link to a folder called “Internal Club Penguin PDFs” on 4Chan, with a simple message: “I no longer need these :).” The link leads to files relating to the game, including information on corporate strategies, advertising, Disney+ plans, business projects, developer tools, and internal infrastructure info, though the group claims they have obtained more information than what they have leaked. I didn’t expect to write a paragraph about Club Penguin today.
4. Not so Humane
The much hated ‘AI Pin’ that dominated the consumer tech conversation earlier this year by way of simply being a bad product, is now an even worse product. Tech Crunch reports that Humane’s ‘AI Pin’ now has a battery fire risk, pertaining to the charging case. “Our investigation determined that the battery supplier was no longer meeting our quality standards and that there is a potential that certain battery cells supplied by this vendor may pose a fire safety risk,” Humane told Tech Crunch. “As a result, we immediately disqualified this battery vendor while we work to identify a new vendor to avoid such issues and maintain our high-quality standards.” Seems bad.
5. Yuck, more AI
Elon Musk’s xAI venture has announced that it’s building a supercomputer in Memphis. Via Bloomberg, the supercomputer will improve xAI’s capacity and will help in its attempt to catch up on the AI race, and since work on the facility’s planning began in March, it has been labelled “largest multibillion-dollar investment in the city of Memphis’s history,” president of the Greater Memphis Chamber Ted Townsend said.
BONUS ITEM: Bluey coins! Bluey coins!!!!
Bluey fans, get your wallets ready! 🤩
— 9News Australia (@9NewsAUS) June 5, 2024
$1 coins featuring Australia’s favourite blue heeler, Bluey, are set to be released by the Royal Australian Mint tomorrow.
The 2024 Bluey Dollarbucks are a collection of three colourful coins including different characters. #9News
WHERE… pic.twitter.com/bqgiM1YNjG
Have a lovely day.
Image: Gizmodo Australia