Mois : octobre 2021 (Page 3 of 3)

An Inconvenient Truth About AI

7 octobre 2021 / noflux

“Regardless of what you might think about AI, the reality is that just about every successful deployment has either one of two expedients: It has a person somewhere in the loop, or the cost of failure, should the system blunder, is very low. In 2002, iRobot, a company that I cofounded, introduced the first mass-market autonomous home-cleaning robot, the Roomba, at a price that severely constricted how much AI we could endow it with. The limited AI wasn’t a problem, though. Our worst failure scenarios had the Roomba missing a patch of floor and failing to pick up a dustball.”

Source : An Inconvenient Truth About AI

More details about the October 4 outage – Facebook Engineering

7 octobre 2021 / noflux

“One of the jobs performed by our smaller facilities is to respond to DNS queries. DNS is the address book of the internet, enabling the simple web names we type into browsers to be translated into specific server IP addresses. Those translation queries are answered by our authoritative name servers that occupy well known IP addresses themselves, which in turn are advertised to the rest of the internet via another protocol called the border gateway protocol (BGP).
To ensure reliable operation, our DNS servers disable those BGP advertisements if they themselves can not speak to our data centers, since this is an indication of an unhealthy network connection. In the recent outage the entire backbone was removed from operation, making these locations declare themselves unhealthy and withdraw those BGP advertisements. The end result was that our DNS servers became unreachable even though they were still operational. This made it impossible for the rest of the internet to find our servers.
All of this happened very fast. And as our engineers worked to figure out what was happening and why, they faced two large obstacles: first, it was not possible to access our data centers through our normal means because their networks were down, and second, the total loss of DNS broke many of the internal tools we’d normally use to investigate and resolve outages like this.”

Source : More details about the October 4 outage – Facebook Engineering

Whistle-Blower Says Facebook ‘Chooses Profits Over Safety’

4 octobre 2021 / noflux

“While “Facebook has publicized its work to combat misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and insurrection,” Ms. Haugen’s documents told a different story, one cover letter read. “In reality, Facebook knew its algorithms and platforms promoted this type of harmful content, and it failed to deploy internally recommended or lasting countermeasures.””

Source : Whistle-Blower Says Facebook ‘Chooses Profits Over Safety’ – The New York Times

Deep in rural China, bitcoin miners are packing up

1 octobre 2021 / noflux

“To evade the clampdown, big miners have sent their machines overseas. Mr Su, who also runs a logistics business that transports mining machines, has been chartering Boeing 747s to get used ones out swiftly. Most are going to Russia and Kazakhstan, which together account for about 13% of the world’s bitcoin mining. But there are few data centres abroad with space for lots of new machines, including in America, the second-biggest miner. Building a farm there costs between five and ten times what it does in China, says Mr Su. That is too much for most Chinese miners. More than half of their computers will stay put for now, he says.”

Source : Deep in rural China, bitcoin miners are packing up | The Economist