« One assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations. » Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret
The US government has suspended its effort to survey #cryptocurrency#mining operations over their ballooning energy use following a lawsuit from an industry that has been accused by environmental groups of fueling the climate crisis.
A federal judge in Texas has granted a temporary order #blocking the new requirements that would ascertain the energy use of the crypto miners, stating that the industry had shown it would suffer “#irreparable#injury” if it was made to comply.
🕵️♂️ Beware! A new #macOS backdoor dubbed "#RustDoor" is targeting 💰 #cryptocurrency companies. Once disguised as a Visual Studio update, now hiding in job offer PDFs.
The influencer that the internet needs - Cory Doctorow (find him at @pluralistic, pluralistic.net, craphound.com) - is back in my reading list with a second book for 2024. I backed the Kickstarter for the audiobook of the sequel to Red Team Blues (The Bezzle, review coming as soon as it's released!), choosing to take ebooks of Red Team Blues and The Bezzle rather than the audiobook as I like to read rather than listen. Cory chooses to Kickstart his books because Amazon forces reader-hostile DRM onto his works, and in his infinite wisdom, he wants his readers to be able to consume his content in they way they see fit, not in the way a rapacious tech giant demands. It's a publishing strategy that's worked out well for him so far. I wish more authors had the same opportunity to avoid being ensnared in the Amazon flywheel which operates to the detriment of both content creators and content consumers. (For more on this, read Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory and Rebecca Giblin, reviewed by me as Book 1 of my 2024 reading list!)
But I digress. What's Red Team Blues about? It's a hardboiled tale by way of Silicon Valley, where the protagonist just wants to do one more job before a well-earned retirement... and you can guess how well that goes. There's cryptocurrency and financial shenanigans that 67-yo Martin Hench is ably equipped to deal with, even if the blowback from his investigations take him well out of his comfort zone (a tricked-out tour bus named The Unsalted Hash). Hench is good with the ladies and knows his way around the dark corners of the internet like a Chandleresque gumshoe knows which bar to find a lead. There's social commentary that spans a gamut of problems with Big Tech and those left behind when the money floats to the top.
The writing leads you along at a brisk pace - I read this over a few days easily - but at times I found I could see Cory behind the veil of two characters having a particularly erudite and wordy discourse about computing or crypto. I pushed this aside when I realised that this was probably a case where a very intelligent author was supplying dialogue for a pair of equally intelligent characters, and perhaps I was just a little dumber than everyone involved.
I can't wait for the release of The Bezzle; it's not yet on sale, but you can get a copy of Red Team Blues from Cory's webstore at craphound.com/shop/ while you wait for the sequel's release!
🚨Glupteba botnet upgrades with UEFI firmware stealth tech, making it undetectable by regular antivirus. This nasty #malware steals info, mines #cryptocurrency , and attacks your router.
Londongrad has defected to the capital of Russian oil trading and money laundering, #Dubai.
“Dubai by contrast, they say, has sold twice as many £15 million homes compared to London in the last year. The #UAE city “appeals due to less state scrutiny into finances and sources of wealth,” the report concludes."
"UAE banks began to tighten their policy towards clients with Russian citizenship in the autumn of 2023. A bank in Hong Kong had to be added to the payment chain, but since February 2024 it has stopped participating in the scheme, and payments are now made in #cryptocurrency." https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/02/19/7442486/
Tea 2.0? (The linked medium article has lots of angry comments from early adopters thinking they should receive more tokens)