Apple Acquires AI startup Lattice.io

Apple Acquired Lattice Data –AI Enabled Implication Engine

Apple has acquired its own company to fill up its potentials in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence, as huge tech companies tend to gear up in making stronger headway in this area. Apple has precisely picked up Lattice Data, a company which tends to apply an AI enabled implication engine to take unstructured `dark’ data turning it into structured information and it had been reported from a source that Apple had paid a price of about $200 million for the same.

The deal had been closed recently according to a source and around 20 engineers had joined the bigger company. A standard Apple confirmation had been received wherein a first source had alerted regarding the same. According to Apple spokesperson who had informed TechCrunch, stated that Apple tends to buy smaller technology companies from time to time and generally no discussions are done on the purpose or plans.

Last year, Lattice had unobtrusively raised around $20 million funds from GV, Madrona and InQTel before exiting from stealth. Lattice founded in 2015 had been under the radar though it has a outstanding pedigree. The company was co-founded by Christopher Re, Michaeol Cafarella, Raphael Hoffmann and Feng Niu as commercialization of DeepDive which is a system developed at Stanford to `extract value from dark data’.

Dark Data

A professor at Stanford, Re, had won a MacArthur Genius Grant for his work on DeepDive and is presently the chief scientist at Lattice. Cafarella who had started at CEO of Lattice now the CTO is a professor at the University of Michigan and is recognised as one of the co-creators of Hadoop while Niu is the chief engineering officer of lattice.

According to his LinkedIn, Cafarella together with Hoffmann who had since moved to Google also had worked on developing DeepDive. Andy Jacques is the CEO of Lattice who had joined last year, is a seasoned enterprise executive. What could possibly be called the dark data?

Our linked, digital world tends to produce data at a fast-tracked speed and in 2013; there were 4.4 zettabytes of data which is anticipated to increase to 44 zettabytes by 2020. IBM has estimated that 90% of the data prevailing today was produced in the last two years.

Application of System - Diverse

However between 70 and 80% of the said data is unstructured which is `dark’ and hence mostly useless with regards to processing and analytics. Lattice tends to utilise machine learning to basically utilise that data in order and make it useful.

Applications of the system is said to be diverse and can be utilised in international policing as well as solving crimes like in this case in detection of human trafficking, in medical research as well as in helping to organize and analyse paleontological research. Besides this it could also be utilised in assisting in training AI systems in the creation of added useful data feeds.

It is not known who Lattice has been working with and also how Apple plans to utilise the technology. It is speculated that there could be an AI play. As per a source, Lattice had discussions with the other tech businesses with regards to the improvement of their AI assistants including Alexa of Amazon and Bixby of Samsung and had recently spent some time in South Korea.

Global Cyber Attack: Security blogger Halts Ransomware By Accident

CYBER ATTACK HALTED BY ACCIDENT

The world has become much advanced since the inception of the internet. The internet has revolutionised the world and has been able to bridge the gap between the world. This has made the world a much better place to live. We are quite fortunate that we are living in this era to experience the impossible ones.

Well, there are many cyber-attacks which break the net often. Some become the easy victim of all this. Often we hear that the accounts have been hacked and this leads to the chaos. Recently there was a news of a UK security where he has reported to the BBC that how accidently he had brought a stop of the malicious ransomware which has affected the numerous organisations.

THE REPORT 

The man is known as the Malware Tech which is his pseudo name. After hearing about the technological news about the latest malware attack, he wanted to investigate the matter. The cyber-attack spread all across the globe and it has created a huge impact in the world of technology.

The technological news kept the update on this cyber-attack. After the investigation, he found that the solution and brought malicious ransomware to a halt. It appeared to be a kill switch in the code of the software. He admitted that the discovery was purely accidental.

Even after the accidental discovery, it did not let to the proper repair of the ransomware. The event brought a halt in spreading it to the other computers. Well this was something very crucial that has to be needed.

THE DISCOVERY

After the discovery, the guy found that the malware was trying to contact a particular type of web address every time a new computer was affected. The web address was not that simple. It was a combination of letters and moreover it was not registered. The person decided to register the web address and eventually he ended up buying the address for $10.69 (£8). This gave him the access where the computers were accessed from. This gave him the idea how the ransomware was spreading.

THE DEFEAT

The registration has only stopped but that doesn’t mean it had stopped the malware spreading. There are still files which will be held for ransom. The recent technology news have stated that the ransomware has started ignoring the kill switch. You should keep an update on the recent technology news to know more details.

THE IMPACT

The impact has been huge in the UK affecting the health clinics and several computers. There were many spam emails that appeared to contain invalid invoices and job offers. The incident took the world by storm. There were also many security warnings and other valid files.

The encrypted ransomware demanded almost payment of $300 to $600 to restore access. Well, this was a huge issue and the people had to face the consequences for this. The digital transactions went for a toss. The antivirus giant Avast had observed infections of more than 57000 in 100 countries.

The Evolution of the Internet

Friendly Research Network – Criminal Activity

The internet has progressed over a period of time from humble starting in 1972 when Ray Tomlinson, Cambridge computer scientist had introduced emoji during the launch of the first iPhone in 2007 bringing the internet in the pocket.

 And so the internet has been transformed in a way where the user tends to stay linked whenever the need arises enabling them to connect with several of our home appliances like light thermostat controls and TV. The number of computers linked to the internet has increased tremendously and the number of users too has augmented from a handful of computer scientists to 1.5 billion consumers.

The extent of the network has crossed beyond the United States to each and every area of the world. However, its popularity also tends to have a disadvantage since it has progressed from a friendly research network to an area of criminal activity comprising of fraud and identity theft.

 The usage of internet has risen since 1995 wherein the researchers had initially begun tracking this figure and though the assessments tends to differ from 1 billion to 1.5 billion users, all may agree that the net seems to have room from expansion since the overall population of the world has reached 6 billion.

Domain Name System of Internet - Developed

This would mean that more than 4 billion people across the globe tend to be without internet access presently. The internet has improved from a U.S. controlled communication medium to the one which has increased rapidly in growth in Asia and Europe.

 The Domain Name System of the Internet had been developed in 1984 to counterpart complex IP addresses with names which were easy to recall ending in extensions like .com, .org, .edu, .gov, .mil together with country codes comprising of .de for Germany.

The U.S. Department of Commerce had privatized domain name registrations and operation in 1998, through the development of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and thereafter, domain names sales have escalated almost 10 times though .com tends to be the most well-known domain.

The Berners-Lee, in 1990, had designed the World Wide Web as a means of publishing information in a hypertext form on the Internet. The Web started to make headway in 1993, after Marc Andreessen, a computer science student had developed the first well-known Web browser namely Mosaic. Thereafter the number of Web sites together with Web pages has been on the rise.

Measured – Terabytes/Petabytes, Heading Towards Exabytes

Experts have been objecting regarding how much traffic is on the internet and the speed of its growth. Could it be increasing at 50% to 60% a year or 100%? When the daily traffic has crossed 3 million packets, there is no question that the figure has increased since 1974.

Initially, measured in terms of terabytes and petabytes, the scientist have now come to the conclusion that the future would be heading towards monthly traffic volumes in the exabytes that is 10 to 18th power bytes. In the mid-1990s, e-commerce rushed on the scent and has been developing since then in terms of total sales as well as a percentage of all retail sales.

 It is difficult to know the worldwide e-commerce statistic though the U.S. Commerce Department have been following U.S. e-commerce sales from the fourth quarter of 1999. The Morris Worm was said to be the first major attack on the Internet way back in 1988 which disabled almost 10% of the Internets’ 60,000 host computers. Presently hundreds of more threatening attacks are being targeted at Internet users daily.

Spam Driven Phishing Scams

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team – US-CERT have stopped the counting of security occurrence reports it had received in 2004 since the Internet connected attacks had become an usual occurrence and it felt that it would be too difficult to track the same.

Way back in 2003, it had been observed that 15 billion spam messages were sent daily over the Internet which meant that 45% of all the e-mail messages had been uncalled-for, for things such as drugs and penny stock. These figures seemed to be quite old-fashioned currently in comparison to the 164 billion spam messages that were sent each day which represent 97% of the overall e-mail. Spam has changed during the last five years from being disturbing to being malicious with the progress of spam driven phishing scams.

Experts are of the opinion that the Internet would be continuing along its phenomenal growth path in spite of the prevailing global economic crisis. The difference is that the Internet would become mobile and social and now users have been getting access to the Internet through their cell phones than the PCs.

The favourite activities of the users nowadays are to download music, video together with ringtones instead of searching the Web or utilising it for sending e-mails. Users now tend to have the internet in their pocket and utilise it while on the go.

Apple Leak Reveals iPhone 7S Bad News

Controversy Surrounding the Release of Apple iPhone 7S

The world is excited about the release of the latest version of iPhone, that will be in the market in this year, but the sources have confirmed that there is nothing true in the release date of iPhone 7S and because of this contagious leaks; the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook has snapped the leakers of this news blaming that it is because of the trouble that surrounded this fake news has led to so many issues that they would no longer will be able to launch iPhone 7S in this year.

He even confirmed that this vicious leakage has barred the manufacturing process of iPhone 7S, but the upcoming models like iPhone 8 is also facing serious problems and since the problems were unprecedented, hence the latest version is facing serious issues.

The reports suggest that iPhone 7S will not be launched before 2018, which is really disheartening for the ones who were eagerly waiting to get hold of this big catch probably the best in terms of smartphones.

A multinational Deutsche Bank based in Germany has prepared a research on this issue and there research suggest that no version of iPhone will be launched in market this year and the research substantiates the fact that the primary reason behind delaying of supply of iPhone is the shortage of components and technical know-how rather than the leaks that occurred surrounding release date of iPhones.

The manufacturers are trying to hide their inefficiency behind the wale of leakages. Delays are inevitable and the iPhone users have to be patient before they grab their favorite iPhone model induced by all sorts of technologically resilience.

Tim Cook has got an opportunity to blame the media reports of leaking the release date of iPhone 7S, but the truth behind the delay lies in their leaking system of manufacturing. So, the question still remains unanswered and release date of iPhone 7S is still a mystery.

The upcoming model of iPhone is said to be bestowed with new and smart technologies. News says that this new model would be attached with a touch bar which was not there in the previous models and this would equip the users with smart and less complicated shortcuts of iPhone 7S and this has increased the excitement of all the users who are eagerly waiting for this model to be launched.

Some critics have suggested that this is a publicity stunt and by delaying the release, Apple is creating the ground and accurate moment for launching their product and some also suggest that the reason behind this delay is that Apple still hasn’t upgraded its technology to add something new to their new release since 2014 and they know that the only way through which they can increase their sale by bringing in new technological upsurge and no improvement has been done in this regard till date. Further, the wait for iPhone 7S seems worth the wait as Apple has assured its users to grant them with unique kind of smartness in their upcoming release.

iCar Release Date Rumours

Apple’s Electric iCar

Since February 2015 reports have been circulating that Apple intends manufacturing electric iCar to compete with Tesla. This source of information had come up after Business Insider had received some facts from an Apple employee with some knowledge on the development on the subject. There were rumours that Apple will now be focusing on autonomous driving system.

 This had added up with the findings of cars that were registered with Apple arrayed with sensors/cameras which had been exposed later and had led to the visions of Apple iCar. The Wall Street Journal had earlier stated that there were several hundred, according to Apple employees working on the project and the iCar had been named `Titan’.

Though many are of the belief that Apple had intention of moving away from autonomous car project, a latest letter addressed to US transport regulators by Steve Kenner, the director of product integrity of Apple conveys something else. Apple had seemingly informed that it had been excited about the prospective of automated system in several capacities, inclusive of transportation as well as there were substantial collective benefits of automated vehicles to be realised.

The same had been confirmed by one of spokesman of Apple that the letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – NHTSA, had been impelled by its `heavy investment in machine learning and autonomous system.

Privacy of Individual – Not to be Compromised

Moreover it also wanted to assist in outlining the best practises in the future industry. The letter had also stated not to introduce many rules with regards to the testing of self-driving cars, requesting that launching manufacturers as well as fresh entrants should be equally treated.

A suggestion had been made by Kenner that companies need to share data from crashes together with near-misses in order to develop a better comprehensive image instead of one company alone supporting in improving the system. And knowing Apple to be focused on user privacy, the same would be out of character of not making a mention of it in the letter.

Besides this Kenner also observed that the privacy of the individual should not be compromised by the sharing of data which regulates `address privacy challenges connected with the collection, used together with sharing of automated vehicle data’.

Enhance Customer Experience

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple had answered during the Q4 2016 financial results of Apple topics on Apple Pay, Siri together with the importance of Apple Car. Though he had not confirmed or denied the presence of the rumoured electric car of Apple he informed that Apple always visualized for methods wherein they could enhance the experience together with the experience of the customers on various sets of products.

He had further mentioned that they are always looking at new things and the car space has been an area which is evident with lot of technologies that will be available or would be capable of revolutionizing the car experience. He adds that it is so interesting from that point of view though nothing to certainly nothing to make an announcement.

The CEO of Apple as usual is being evasive on the topic and considering the same, it does indicate that Apple could have something to make an announcement in the near future.