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Today’s topics include Google’s role in helping Microsoft patch a major zero-day vulnerability; Nvidia unwrapping its Volta Data Center GPU for artificial intelligence; Microsoft detailing how 500 million Windows 10 devices expand developer opportunities; and Google launching its fourth cloud region stateside.
Microsoft has Google to thank for revealing a new vulnerability in current versions of Windows, SharePoint and the company’s stand-alone security software—a vulnerability so serious that Microsoft rushed through a fix that’s already being sent out as an update to Windows.
The vulnerability, which was found by staffers of Google Project Zero, works by having the Microsoft security software actually execute the malware while scanning.
The exploit can be delivered in an email or an instant message, and because it’s executed by the security scan, it would not even need to be opened. Microsoft has already released a fix to the vulnerability in the automatic updates for its security software.
Automatic updating for security works for individual and for enterprise implementations of Windows and other affected products, and because of this, the company isn’t recommending that users take any action.
At his company’s annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, spoke at length about the promise and current implementations of artificial intelligence and how Nvidia’s newest GPUs and software will help democratize the field for developers across a wide range of industries.
The company made a series of announcements, including its Tesla V100 Data Center GPU based on its new Volta GPU architecture, which is designed for AI and other high-performance applications.
Volta is the company’s seventh-generation GPU architecture built with a massive 21 billion transistors, delivering performance equivalent to 100 CPUs for deep learning.
Opportunity was the theme of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s opening address at his company’s annual Build developer conference in Seattle May 10.
The technology giant used the occasion to announce several new tools and services intended to help its developer community capitalize on the possibilities that an increasingly data-rich world can offer to coders.
The IT industry has come a long way since software developers primarily targeted PCs and client-server environments.
The amount of data generated by today’s devices and tomorrow’s intelligent systems eclipses the total amount of traffic that bounced around the early internet, observed Nadella, who revealed that there are 500 million Windows 10 devices and 100 million Office 365 commercial customers that developers can now target.
Google has added a fourth cloud services region in the United States—this one in northern Virginia. The newly designated us-east4 cloud region will significantly improve performance and speed for U.S. customers of Google’s cloud platform services with a presence in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the country.
For instance, Google said cloud customers who run their workloads in the new region can expect between a 20 percent and 25 percent reduction in latency when serving users in Washington, D.C., compared to using the company’s Iowa or South Carolina regions.
Companies can expect similar gains in New York, Boston, Montreal and Toronto, Google Cloud Platform Product Manager Dave Stiver announced in a blog last week.
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