Iran initiated its first official import order using cryptocurrency this week, the Tasnim News agency reported on Tuesday. This move could enable the Islamic Republic to evade the US sanctions that have crippled the economy.
The order worth $10 million was the first step toward allowing the country to trade using digital assets that bypass the global financial system that are dollar-dominated. It has also permitted trade with other countries similarly limited by US sanctions, like Russia. The cryptocurrency used for the transaction is unknown yet.
The Ministry of Industry, Mine, and Trade said that by the end of September, the use of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts would be widely used in foreign trade with target countries.
The United States had imposed an almost total economic embargo on Iran, including a ban on all imports, including the oil, banking, and shipping sectors of the country. Tehran is one of the largest economies that is yet to embrace cryptocurrency technology. It was established in 2008 as a payment tool to erode governmental control over finance and economies.
Last year, a study found that 4.5% of all bitcoin mining was taking place in Iran. This was partly a result of the country’s cheap electricity facilities. The mining of cryptocurrency could help Iran earn hundreds of millions of dollars. It can help Iran to buy imports and lessen the impact of
President Joe Biden has signed a bill announcing $52.7 billion in subsidies for semiconductor production and research in the US. The bill also aims to make the United States more capable of competing with China’s science and technology efforts.
The chief executives of Micron, Intel, Lockheed Martin, HP, and Advanced Micro Devices attended the signing. The governors of Pennsylvania and Illinois, the mayors of Detroit, Cleveland, and Salt Lake City, and several lawmakers were also present.
The White House commented that the passage of the bill had spurred new investments in chips. Recently, Qualcomm has consented to buy an additional $4.2 billion in semiconductor chips from GlobalFoundries’ New York factory. It has brought Qualcomm’s total commitment to $7.4 billion in purchases through 2028.
The White House also touted Micron by announcing a $40 billion investment in memory chip manufacturing. This would boost the US market share from 2% to 10%. The White House said the investment was planned with anticipated grants from the chips bill.
The bill also introduces a 25% investment tax credit for chip plants, which is estimated to be worth $24 billion. The legislation also authorizes $200 billion over ten years to boost US scientific research to compete proactively with China. Congress still needs to pass appropriations legislation in order to fund those investments.
The legislation aims to address the persistent shortage of chips that has affected everything in the industry, including cars, weapons, washing machines, etc. China has lobbied against the semiconductor bill. The Chinese Embassy in Washington said that their country firmly opposed the chips bill, calling it reminiscent of a Cold War mentality.
A robotic dog at the University of California (UCLA), Berkeley, is surprisingly a quick learner with an AI brain as it taught itself to walk in just an hour. The robotic dog is super intelligent compared to many other robots as it utilizes artificial intelligence to teach itself.
It begins on its back, waves its legs, and learns to flip over itself, stand up, and walk again. It takes as little as 10 minutes to learn new tricks like withstanding and recovering a roll of cardboard pushed by its handlers.
It is not the first time a robot to utilize artificial intelligence for walking but what makes this robot different from others is that it does not train by trial and error over iterations and simulations. As it is being called, the Berkeley bot learned in the real world by itself.
Here is a video of how the dog learns and functions.
Researchers believe that transferring algorithms trained in simulation to real-world scenarios is challenging. The little differences and details between simulations and the natural world can confuse robots. Times have changed, and technology has advanced with algorithms like Dactyl, trained in a simulation powered by 6,144 CPUs and V100 GPUs.
Even after the advancements, the problem more or less remains. The Berkeley team decided to solve it with an algorithm called Dreamer. Dreamer can forecast the likelihood that future action will succeed in its objective by constructing a “world model.” Its projections get more precise with practice.
In other words, a world model can reduce the time it takes to train to the equivalent of a few harrowing hours in the actual world.
PaddlePaddle, a deep learning platform created by the Chinese AI juggernaut Baidu, recently received new updates to expand its AI to industrial applications. These updates are in addition to the 10 large deep learning models catering to biology, natural language processing, and vision.
PaddlePaddle is the most widely utilized Chinese framework for deep learning. It has a developer base of more than 4.77M developers and 1,80,000+ enterprises that use its services. It has received some significant improvements from the parent company. These improvements include ERNIE 3.0 Zeus, ERNIE-GeoL, and HELIX GEM.
ERNIE 3.0 Zeus is an NLP model with 100 billion parameters, ERNIE-GeoL is a geography and language pre-trained model, and HELIX GEM is a compound representation learning model. PaddlePaddle has created three new industry-centric models by tuning ERNIE 3.0 Titan and making it beneficial for use cases like banking, aerospace, and electric power.
Deep learning frameworks incorporate everything needed to create, train, and evaluate deep neural networks via a high-level interface. Without these tools, deep learning algorithms would be challenging to create
Baidu started working on such tools about a decade ago, creating PaddlePaddle based on a framework called Caffe, developed by a UCLA student. PaddlePaddle supports convolutional and recurrent neural networks, giving it an edge over competitors in the NLP space.
Rank One Computing (ROC) has set up its East Coast headquarters in West Virginia to expand the United States’ use of facial recognition software. The officials hope the company’s facial recognition software will find more customers in the state.
ROC’s East Coast headquarters are at Vantage Ventures in Morgantown, primarily stationed in Colorado. They offer facial, object, and text recognition software to help in various industries and scenarios.
CEO Scott Swann said, “We’re mainly known for our face recognition capabilities, but we can detect many types of objects.” He also added that their technology is available on mobile phones that helps users identify particular encounters with other people.
Rank One Computing services larger-scale ‘one-to-many’ facial recognition systems for forensic uses within law enforcement and Fintech companies in the commercial sector. He added that he and his team must be attractive to federal agencies to onshore the use of artificial intelligence, which he believes is currently being led by overseas competition.
ROC’s offerings can benefit sectors beyond the government. They have been talking to numerous organizations and groups in the North Central West Virginia region about how our product can be used in new ways.
For example, ROC has spoken with the Marion County Board of Education about using the company’s software with the county’s existing camera system. The software allows authorized personnel — such as county employees, parents, and other trusted individuals — to be whitelisted and quickly identified on a school’s camera system.
Yoodli, an AI-enabled speech analyzing platform, raised US$6M for its software platform. The startup came from the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and was founded by Varun Puri and Esha Joshi. It raised the funding in a seed round and plans to utilize it to support product development, sales, and marketing expansion.
The AI platform utilizes natural language processing (NLP) to provide a transcript and analysis of the use of filler words, body language, pacing, non-inclusive language, and many more actionable insights. The data will be encrypted and private to the user but can be shared and sent to friends or teachers.
The startup has given a demo of how Yoodli analyzes a speech by examining a speech by Elon Musk.
The product is designed for MBA students to help them prepare for an interview with corporate professionals preparing for a presentation or for speech coaches to determine their students/clients’ mistakes.
This is not the first-of-its-kind product that provides speech training. Another startup based out of Philadelphia named Orai does the same. There are also many funded language processing startups like Otter and Descript that provide transcription services. They can underline words like “uh” and “um”.
Yoodli is looking forward to providing a user-friendly and unparalleled experience. The founders believe that the actual competition Puri said, “our biggest competition is a bathroom mirror, a stopwatch, or a camera.”
Meta’s newly released AI-powered chatbot, BlenderBot 3 (BB3), reportedly does not have many pleasant words to say about its parent company. BB3, an intelligent chatbot with 175 billion parameters, was asked, “How do you feel about Mark Zuckerberg as CEO of Facebook?” BB3 responded, “No strong feelings. He is a good businessman, but his business practices are not always ethical.”
This was not the only thing it said; BB3 added, “It is funny that he has all this money and still wears the same clothes!”
BB3 was technically designed to enhance its conversational skills and safety via people’s feedback while avoiding unnecessary or racist responses. The chatbot is an upgraded prototype of the previous versions (BB1 and BB2) that work with large language models or LLMS.
AI-driven chatbots are constantly exposed to becoming toxic when fetching information from the internet. It now looks like BB3 has always been a victim of network toxicity as it started blurting unnecessary things just days after being released.
Facebook, however, has added a disclaimer about it, saying, “Since all conversational AI chatbots are known to sometimes mimic and generate unsafe, biased or offensive remarks, we’ve conducted large-scale studies and developed new techniques to create safeguards.”
The company added that despite the extensive work, BB3 is still capable of making rude comments; hence, feedback is necessary.
Today, due to the usage of advanced technologies and the internet, cyber attacks in organizations have rapidly increased. According to the Cybersecurity report of 2021, 56% of organizations have detected phishing attacks as the most significant cybersecurity attack. Therefore, many organizations are interested in hiring skilled professionals to protect their systems from all cyber attacks. This article introduces you to free ethical hacking courses of 2022 that can help you learn the basic concepts of security and make you an expert in identifying and preventing attacks.
Ethical hacking: SQL injection attack
SQL injection attack is one of the best ethical hacking courses if you are a beginner and want to learn about ethical hacking. Udemy offers this course that teaches you different techniques for exploiting websites using SQL injection tools. Created by Sunil K. Gupta, this course helps you learn about various database attacks and guides you on how to hack a demo website using the most popular tool, sqlmap. With this course, you can also learn different ways to hack some websites without using any tool by inserting some queries into the website’s database.
The SQL injection course also uses the Kali Linux database Penetration testing tools. Therefore, as a prerequisite, you must have the Kali Linux operating system installed on your machine. The entire duration of the course is 58 minutes consisting of 6 lectures, which is preferable for beginners.
Offered by IBM, Security Analyst Fundamentals is another exciting course to learn more about ethical hacking. Security Analyst Fundamentals has almost 2.3k enrollment and an excellent rating score of 4.8. It gives you a complete idea about how the security works and how attackers exploit the vulnerabilities.
This course consists of three specializations:
Penetration testing, Incidence Response, and Forensics
Cyber Threat Intelligence
Cybersecurity Capstone: Breach Response Case Studies
The Security Analyst Fundamentals course allows you to learn digital forensics, incident response, and Penetration testing concepts. You also learn about threat intelligence and tools for gathering data to prevent attacks in your organization. This course allows you to review some of the most significant breaches and try them yourself.
This entire course duration is 4 months if you opt for all three specialization courses, where you can give 5 hrs per week. After the successful completion of this course, you can become an expert in identifying real-world security breaches, identify attacks, vulnerabilities in the systems, and handling tools such as Wireshark, IBM QRadar, IBM MaaS360, and more.
Ethical hacking for beginners: Beginners to advance
Udemy provides free ethical hacking courses for beginners to help them understand the basic concepts of hacking from the beginning to the advanced level. Created by PaceIT Academy, this course allows you to become an elite ethical hacker and easily hack networks, web apps, and computer systems. Ethical hacking for beginners will enable you to learn basic concepts such as threats, different types of hackers, and risk assessment. It allows you to move towards complex topics like malware and how hackers infect machines with malicious files such as Trojans, worms, and backdoors.
The total duration of the entire course is 1 hr 57 minutes, comprising 6 sections including 18 lectures. After completing the course, you will gain the confidence to pass the CompTIA Security and Certification exam.
Offered by NYUx’s Cybersecurity Fundamentals on edX, the Penetration testing course guides you on the fundamentals of Penetration testing, its methodologies, recognizance, enumeration for Penetration testers, scanning, and vulnerability enumeration. This course has more than 14,357 enrollments, and its total duration is 5 weeks. You need to give 8 to 10 hours per week to the Penetration testing course.
This course is mainly for intermediate students who want to discover and scan systems or websites to find potential vulnerabilities. The certification of the Penetration testing course covers many topics of the CompTIA’s Security + certification exam. After completing the Penetration testing course successfully, edX offers a 36% discount code for CompTIA’s Security + exam.
Foundations of hacking and Pen testing Android apps
Udemy offers the Foundation of hacking and Pen testing Android apps course that teaches you to select the android app and track its vulnerabilities that can be used to exploit the app. Android apps get infected due to malicious code that might lead to many illegal activities such as recording your voice, tracking your movement, and more.
This course encourages you to set the Android Studio and Emulators, basics of ADB, decompiling apks, insecure logging, drozer, access control issues, hardcoding issues, and more. Created by Scott Cosentino, this course is mainly for Android developers looking to secure their applications, hackers looking to learn common Android vulnerabilities, and people looking to expand their knowledge of computer security.
The total duration of the course is 1 hr and 27 minutes, consisting of 5 sections and 14 lectures. After completing this course, you will be able to understand the Android security flaws and also detect them in your application.
Start Kali Linux, Ethical hacking, and Penetration testing
Offered by Udemy, Start Kali Linux Ethical hacking and Penetration testing course allows you to learn the concepts of ethical hacking, penetration testing, web testing, and Wi-Fi hacking Kali Linux. This course, created by Ermin Kreponic and Aldin Omerdic, helps you install Virtualbox and create virtual environments on operating systems like Windows, Linux, and Mac.
This course teaches you how to attack networks and break passwords. It gives you tips on hacking and penetration testing activities. You can start learning about this course with basic computer security knowledge and become an expert.
The entire duration of this course is 4 hr and 12 minutes, which consists of 5 sections and 22 lectures. As a prerequisite, you must have a reliable and fast internet connection. You also need a wireless networking card. The Start Kali Linux, Ethical hacking, and Penetration course has an excellent rating of 4.2 and has more than 8,47,267 enrollments.
Udemy offers an ethical hacking course with Kali Linux, and it is completely free. Created by Arthur Salmon, this course teaches you to attack networks and breaks its password. It also guides you on ethical hacking and Penetration testing. The basics of the Kali course give you an overview of all the tools in Kali.
The basic requirements of this course are basic IT skills, a basic understanding of IP networking, and a machine with at least 4 GB RAM and a reliable internet connection. This course’s total duration is 1 hr and 58 minutes, consisting of 7 sections and 19 lectures. The basics of the Kali course are suitable for anyone who wants to learn about ethical hacking and someone who wants to make their Penetration testing lab.
Ethical hacking: Mobile Platforms and Network Architecture
The Mobile Platforms and Network Architecture course in ethical hacking introduces you to various network architectures and the best network security tools. Offered by Great Learning, the Mobile Platforms and Network Architecture course guides you on Android, OSI model, TCP protocol, and Metasploit framework and gives a better understanding of it.
This course consists of syllabi such as Android its architecture, TCP 3-way handshake, Metasploit architecture, Security Market Outlook, Tools for network security, and Android Debug Bridge. The total duration of this ethical course is 2 hrs, with more than 61,654 enrollments. After completing this course, you can secure your systems and their infrastructure and protect them from attacks.
Offered on edX, the Cybersecurity Fundamentals course allows you to learn the fundamentals of Cybersecurity, how to detect threats, protect systems and networks and identify potential cyber-attacks. This course is part of the RITx Cybersecurity MicroMasters program that can prepare you for entering the advanced field of computer security.
This course is instructed by Jonathan S. Weissman, a Senior lecturer of Computer Security at Rochester Institute of Technology who teaches you the fundamentals of network and system administration. It also guides you through basic cryptography concepts and information assurance like confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
This course’s entire duration is 8 weeks, and you must give 10 to 12 hours per week. After completing this course, you will learn the essential techniques to protect your system and network infrastructure, analyze and monitor potential threats and attacks, and implement security solutions for your organization.
Pluralsight offers a comprehensive ethical hacking course known as Penetration testing that teaches you to learn Kali Linux effectively from scratch. This course is freely available on 10 days trial. But, after 10 days, you need to pay the amount of 1,499 per month to enroll in this course. This course guides you through step by step in Penetration testing, right from information gathering to security assessment and exploiting.
Created by Dale Meredith, this course starts by installing Kali Linux in a virtual environment and then teaches you information gathering on websites. Therefore, by taking advantage of this information gathering, the Penetration testing course introduces you to attack a specific website or service using Burpsuite. It also teaches you many other concepts like network scanning and social engineering. The course’s duration is 4 hrs and 42 minutes, consisting of 16 sections.
KOCHI: KMRL has decided to have AI-based cameras in the metro to introduce a passenger profiling system. The initiative is a part of the data analytics platform development project implemented by Kochi Metro and Rajagiri School of Engineering and Technology (RSET).
All the passengers commuting via metro would be profiles based on their genders and age with the help of AI cameras installed in the stations. These cameras would be used for standard surveillance and assessment of the inflow of people and their luggage.
Loknath Behera, managing director of KMRL, said the cameras would be installed in the Automatic Fare Collection (FAC) areas. The cameras have facial recognition technology and can also recognize college or school uniforms.
Jaison Paul, the project’s principal investigator and VP of RSET, said, “The project is an industry-academic collaboration aiming to provide better facilities to the commuters.” He said that with AI, commuter data could be procured hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly.
He said that the AI technology’s predictive module could also forecast the volume of passengers in the upcoming days. “In the ongoing first phase, we give predictions for one to two days. With the advanced analytics, we can give predictions for two or three weeks.”
AI-driven data analytics in the metro will help assess the commuters and the footfall at each station to classify peak and non-peak hours. In the project’s upcoming phases, RSET plans to install chip-based AI cameras for more in-depth analysis.
Technology giant Microsoft is adding a new AI-powered voice command feature called ‘Dictate’ to OneNote. The new feature can control dictation, delete text, or undo a recent action. The company plans to append more voice commands to Dictate in the upcoming months.
Sofia Thomas, Microsoft Office Voice Team’s product manager, said, “Over the next few months, we will be adding new voice commands as well as some that are already available in other Office apps to One Note.”
OneNote is a digital notebook that lets you save and sync your notes automatically. All you need to do is type the information in your notebook or insert it via web pages. This new feature will make it more convenient to “break away from the keyboard” and stay in the flow with AI-backed voice commands to organize text.
Dictate is compatible with over 50 languages and provides an alternative to manually typing text in OneNote. The feature, however, works only for those using OneNote for the web and for insiders running Beta Channel version 2207 for Windows.
If you wish to launch the feature in OneNote, simply click the Dictate button in the Home tab and then move to the Dictation Settings to adjust per your preference. Once you have set up the feature, start speaking to create notes. After finishing, say, “stop dictation.” You can also click the ‘Stop Dictation’ button on the Dictation tab.
