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Nvidia Beats TSMC and Intel To Take Top Chip Industry Revenue Crown For the First Time Published on November 25, 2023 at 12:30AM Nvidia has swung from fourth to first place in an assessment of chip industry revenue published today. From a report: Taipei-based financial analyst Dan Nystedt noted that the green team took the revenue crown from contract chip-making titan TSMC as Q3 financials came into view. Those keeping an eye on the world of investing and finance will have seen our report about Nvidia's earnings explosion, evidenced by the firm's publishing of its Q3 FY23 results. Nvidia charted an amazing performance, with a headlining $18.12 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 206% year-over-year (YoY). The firm's profits were also through the roof, and Nystedt posted a graph showing Nvidia elbowed past its chip industry rivals by this metric in Q3 2023, too. Nvidia's advance is supported by multiple highly successful operating segments, which have provided a mul...

Office Landlords Can't Get a Loan Anymore Published on November 24, 2023 at 04:00AM The office sector's credit crunch is intensifying. By one measure, it's now worse than during the 2008-09 global financial crisis. From a report: Only one out of every three securitized office mortgages that expired during the first nine months of 2023 was paid off by the end of September, according to Moody's Analytics. That is the smallest share for the first nine months of any year since at least 2008 and well below the nadir reached in 2009, when 47% of these loans got paid off. That share is also well below the rate before the pandemic, when more than eight out of every 10 maturing securitized office mortgages were paid back in some years. While the numbers cover only office mortgages packaged into bonds -- so-called commercial mortgage-backed securities -- they reflect a broader freeze in the lending market for office buildings. Many office owners can't pay back their old loa...

India Seeks To Regulate Deepfakes Published on November 24, 2023 at 02:30AM India is drafting rules to detect and limit the spread of deepfake content and other harmful AI media, a senior lawmaker said Thursday, following reports of proliferation of such content on social media platforms in recent weeks. From a report: Ashwini Vaishnaw, India's IT Minister, said the ministry held meetings with all large social media companies, industry body Nasscom and academics earlier in the day and has reached a consensus that a regulation is needed to better combat spread of deepfake videos as well as apps that facilitate their creations. "The companies share our concerns and they understood that it's [deepfakes] are not free speech. They understood that it's something that's very harmful to the society," he said. "They understood the need for much heavier regulation on this, so we agree that we will start drafting the regulation today itself." The ministry wil...

The Most Powerful Cosmic Ray Since the Oh-My-God Particle Puzzles Scientists Published on November 24, 2023 at 01:30AM Scientists have detected the most powerful cosmic ray seen in more than three decades. But the exact origin of this turbocharged particle from outer space remains a mystery, with some suggesting that it could have been generated by unknown physics. From a report: The puzzling cosmic ray had an estimated energy of 240 exa-electron volts (EeV; 10^18 volts), making it comparable to the most powerful cosmic ray ever detected, aptly named the Oh-My-God particle, which measured at around 320 EeV when it was discovered in 1991. The findings were published today in Science. "It's amazing because you have to think of what could produce such high energy," says Clancy James, an astronomer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. A cosmic ray, despite its name, is actually a high-energy subatomic particle -- often a proton -- that zips through space at close to th...

Some Firms Are Demanding Steep Repayments If Staff Depart Published on November 24, 2023 at 12:30AM At 26, nurse Benzor Vidal moved from the Philippines to America for work, but quit his unsafe, understaffed nursing home job after 14 weeks. His employment contract stipulated he could owe $20,000+ in damages if he resigned early. The New York Times Magazine digs deeper: This type of contract provision is known as a "stay or pay" clause, and it used to be common only for certain high-paying roles or in certain specialized industries. For airline pilots and software engineers, for example, it has been a longstanding practice at some companies to require employees to stay at their jobs for a defined period of time in order to recoup costs related to hiring and training. But the line between recouping costs and penalizing workers for leaving can be blurry, and companies have increasingly taken advantage of that ambiguity. Workers' rights advocates say that, in many cases, st...

Nvidia's Revenue Triples As AI Chip Boom Continues Published on November 23, 2023 at 04:30AM Nvidia's fiscal third-quarter results surpassed Wall Street's predictions, with revenue growing 206% year over year. However, Nvidia shares are down after the company called for a negative impact in the next quarter due to export restrictions affecting sales in China and other countries. CNBC reports: Nvidia's revenue grew 206% year over year during the quarter ending Oct. 29, according to a statement. Net income, at $9.24 billion, or $3.71 per share, was up from $680 million, or 27 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago. The company's data center revenue totaled $14.51 billion, up 279% and more than the StreetAccount consensus of $12.97 billion. Half of the data center revenue came from cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon, and the other from consumer internet entities and large companies, Nvidia said. Healthy uptake came from clouds that specialize in r...

Thousands of Routers and Cameras Vulnerable To New 0-Day Attacks By Hostile Botnet Published on November 23, 2023 at 03:50AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Miscreants are actively exploiting two new zero-day vulnerabilities to wrangle routers and video recorders into a hostile botnet used in distributed denial-of-service attacks, researchers from networking firm Akamai said Thursday. Both of the vulnerabilities, which were previously unknown to their manufacturers and to the security research community at large, allow for the remote execution of malicious code when the affected devices use default administrative credentials, according to an Akamai post. Unknown attackers have been exploiting the zero-days to compromise the devices so they can be infected with Mirai, a potent piece of open source software that makes routers, cameras, and other types of Internet of Things devices part of a botnet that's capable of waging DDoSes of previously unimaginable siz...