AI, IBM Chips, and a Novel Cloud Security Concept: The Week in Tech News

In the world of IT, real news can easily get mixed with eye-catching headlines and promotional buzz. From AI and chips to cloud security: filter out the noise with our selection of the top 3 tech news stories of the week.

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AI is everywhere

The AI hype is so strong we often forget that artificial intelligence is already an integral part of our everyday lives. 

Firstly, AI played a key role in the development of Covid-19 vaccines. But there are many other, less conspicuous ways we benefit from it directly. 

For example, from anti-spam email filters to fraud detection for your banking account, silent, tiny AI helpers accompany us throughout the day without us necessarily being aware. Whether it is by dimming our phone’s screen brightness or suggesting sentences we tend to use, low-level AI tools do exactly what the best kind of technology does: help out without being noticed. 

But not everything’s about the little things, other common applications have positive effects on our society, like smart city traffic management or energy grid optimisation. 

World Economic Forum 

IBM makes chip breakthrough

For all its innovation potential, the technology industry still has an over-reliance on the diminishing effects of the long/established Moore’s Law, by which the number of transistors in computer chips tends to double in number and halve in size every two years. 

Unfortunately, recent years have seen this rule of thumb falter, with chip manufacturers struggling to keep the good ratio going.  

Enter IBM. The company announced this week a significant breakthrough in the way computer processors can be effectively made. IBM created a 2nm chip it claims can boost performance by 45% over 7nm chips while cutting down energy consumption by 75%.

BBC

A scalable approach to cloud security

Making sure that evolving cloud environments remain protected against malware is becoming increasingly difficult in a world where multi-cloud is the new norm and a single weakness can compromise an entire network

As if human fallibility and the cloud’s sheer size were not enough, attackers are using increasingly sophisticated methods of bypassing traditional security measures and protocols.

Malware is often only valuable until its detected, as its signature can then be easily identified by the system. Yet, scanning an entire cloud ecosystem for irregularities still involves too much complexity and resources due to its sheer size. 

A research initiative by Microsoft’s, Projet Freta, proposes a novel approach: a cloud-centric in-memory scanning system that focuses on virtual machine instances to deliver scalable protection.

TechRepublic

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