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Torc debuts bodily AI for long-haul trucking at NVIDIA GTC 2025

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Torc Robotics Inc. just lately introduced that it’s collaborating with Flextronics Worldwide Ltd. and NVIDIA Corp. to develop a scalable bodily synthetic intelligence compute system for autonomous vans. The corporate final week demonstrated its know-how at NVIDIA GTC in San Jose, Calif.

“It was actually thrilling to make our GTC debut this week, together with the announcement of our NVIDIA and Flex collaboration,” mentioned CJ King, chief know-how officer of Torc, on the occasion. “As we get nearer to commercialization, it’s important to share extra of our best-in-class know-how and get our world-class engineers out right here to fulfill and share the story of Torc with others.”

Based in 2005, Torc is an impartial subsidiary of Daimler Truck AG. The Blacksburg, Va.-based firm provides self-driving car software program and is specializing in commercializing autonomous vans for long-haul purposes within the U.S.

Torc focuses on bodily AI

Torc Robotics mentioned its bodily AI permits self-driving vans to understand, perceive, and carry out complicated actions in the actual (bodily) world. The firm asserted that bodily AI is on the core of its software program stack to allow vans to autonomously navigate their environment utilizing sensors corresponding to lidar, radar, and cameras.

This enables the truck to make knowledgeable selections about lane adjustments, braking, and impediment avoidance to make sure protected and environment friendly autonomous driving operations. Torc claimed that it’s the first deployment of bodily AI for autonomous long-haul trucking at manufacturing scale.

Along with engineering workplaces in Austin, Texas, and Montreal, Quebec, Torc Robotics has a fleet operations facility within the Dallas-Fort Price space in Texas, in addition to a presence in Ann Arbor, Mich.


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NVIDIA DRIVE AGX gives compute structure

Torc mentioned at NVIDIA GTC that it has collaborated intently with NVIDIA on a multi-chip adaptable structure that makes use of DRIVE AGX utilizing the DRIVE Orin system-on-a-chip (SoC) and DriveOS working system.

“NVIDIA DRIVE AGX has been industry-proven in full manufacturing for automotive real-time purposes on the edge,” acknowledged Rishi Dhall, vice chairman of automotive at NVIDIA. “It delivers the excessive compute efficiency, low latency, and multi-sensor connectivity wanted for Torc’s subtle autonomous trucking software program, delivering sturdy notion, prediction, and planning for protected and dependable operation.”

“Torc is on a transparent path to scalable manufacturing for its business launch in 2027 and dealing towards a seamless improve to NVIDIA DRIVE AGX with DRIVE Thor,” he added.

Torc debuts bodily AI for long-haul trucking at NVIDIA GTC 2025

The platform makes use of NVIDIA DRIVE AGX with Flex’s Jupiter compute platform to assist productization and scaled market entry in 2027. | Credit score: Torc Robotics

Flex design contributes to ‘software-defined car’

Flextronics is offering its Jupiter compute design platform and superior manufacturing capabilities. This provides Torc a scalable high-performance manufacturing {hardware} and software program primarily based on an autonomous-ready Freightliner Cascadia. That car is provided with superior applied sciences and redundant programs to assist future deployment of autonomous driving capabilities.

“Our collaboration with Torc, Daimler Truck, and NVIDIA illustrates how Flex companions throughout the complete ecosystem to allow mobility corporations to launch next-generation know-how with higher resilience and pace,” mentioned Mike Thoeny, president for automotive at Flex. “We admire the belief Torc and Daimler Truck have positioned in Flex via leveraging our Jupiter compute platform and superior manufacturing capabilities to ship autonomous long-haul trucking at scale.”

Torc Robotics mentioned NVIDIA DRIVE, paired with Flextronics’ automotive compute design capabilities, adheres to its stringent dimension, efficiency, value, and reliability necessities. The system additionally meets the whole value of possession (TCO) targets of Torc’s fleet prospects, that are pursuing continuous, long-haul driverless trucking integration.

“This work gives a real software-defined car (SDV) performance,” the corporate mentioned. “It’s adaptable to ever-changing operational design domains, together with new lanes, new routes, new hubs, new {hardware} and sensor configurations, new operational guidelines, new highway situations, and extra.”

Torc mentioned its driverless product-acceptance check efficiently validated the platform on a closed course at freeway speeds final yr.

New Morphing Meerkat Phishing Package Mimics 114 Manufacturers Utilizing Victims’ DNS E-mail Data

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Mar 27, 2025Ravie LakshmananE-mail Safety / Malware

New Morphing Meerkat Phishing Package Mimics 114 Manufacturers Utilizing Victims’ DNS E-mail Data

Cybersecurity researchers have make clear a brand new phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform that leverages the Area Title System (DNS) mail alternate (MX) data to serve pretend login pages that impersonate about 114 manufacturers.

DNS intelligence agency Infoblox is monitoring the actor behind the PhaaS, the phishing package, and the associated exercise beneath the moniker Morphing Meerkat.

“The risk actor behind the campaigns usually exploits open redirects on adtech infrastructure, compromises domains for phishing distribution, and distributes stolen credentials by a number of mechanisms, together with Telegram,” the corporate mentioned in a report shared with The Hacker Information.

Cybersecurity

One such marketing campaign leveraging the PhaaS toolkit was documented by Forcepoint in July 2024, the place phishing emails contained hyperlinks to a purported shared doc that, when clicked, directed the recipient to a pretend login web page hosted on Cloudflare R2 with the tip aim of amassing and exfiltrating the credentials through Telegram.

Morphing Meerkat is estimated to have delivered hundreds of spam emails, with the phishing messages utilizing compromised WordPress web sites and open redirect vulnerabilities on promoting platforms like Google-owned DoubleClick to bypass safety filters.

It is also able to translating phishing content material textual content dynamically into over a dozen completely different languages, together with English, Korean, Spanish, Russian, German, Chinese language, and Japanese, to focus on customers internationally.

Along with complicating code readability through obfuscation and inflation, the phishing touchdown pages incorporate anti-analysis measures that prohibit the usage of mouse right-click in addition to keyboard hotkey combos Ctrl + S (save the online web page as HTML), Ctrl + U (open the online web page supply code).

Cybersecurity

However what makes the risk actor actually stand out is its use of DNS MX data obtained from Cloudflare or Google to determine the sufferer’s e mail service supplier (e.g., Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, or Yahoo!) and dynamically serve pretend login pages. Within the occasion, that the phishing package is unable to acknowledge the MX report, it defaults to a Roundcube login web page.

“This assault technique is advantageous to dangerous actors as a result of it allows them to hold out focused assaults on victims by displaying net content material strongly associated to their e mail service supplier,” Infoblox mentioned. “

“The general phishing expertise feels pure as a result of the design of the touchdown web page is in keeping with the spam e mail’s message. This method helps the actor trick the sufferer into submitting their e mail credentials through the phishing net kind.”

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The Standing of Optical Transport Gear


The optical transport community (OTN) market is poised once more for strong development as operators put together their infrastructures to deal with a brand new technology of bandwidth-hungry functions and AI deployments.

“There’s a gentle on the finish of this tunnel,” mentioned Jimmy Yu, vice chairman of analysis at Dell’Oro Group, citing the OTN market’s sturdy efficiency over the past quarter of 2024. “The gear glut is over.”

Distributors have indicated elevated gear order flows, Yu mentioned, and optical income in North America is enhancing.

Serving Telecom Operators and Information Facilities

The OTN market is fueled by cloud computing, 5G deployment and bandwidth-intensive functions, akin to video streaming and AI-driven analytics. AI and cloud put large new calls for on information heart and community operators. As visitors quantity continues to quickly climb, operators are tasked to beat challenges by upgrading services with superior optical community units.

In consequence, telecom operators and information facilities are investing closely in system upgrades, based on a report issued by Orion Market Analysis. Operators are specializing in improvements in wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and software-defined networking (SDN) to boost their OTN capabilities.

The OTN market’s resurgence comes after an gear overbuying interval by which service suppliers hoarded optical transport merchandise, unsure of when COVID-19-era provide chains would recuperate and financial headwinds subside. Moreover, the market is benefiting from the introduction of 1.2 Tbps transmission and extra environment friendly energy use. Nokia’s $2.3 billion acquisition of Infinera, meantime, offered one other jolt of optimism.

Associated:How AI, Vitality Necessities Are Shaping Information Middle Funding

OTN Developments

Along with WDM and SDN deployments, OTN and information heart operators are assessing different improvements designed to make them extra environment friendly, based on Dell’Oro’s Yu. These development embody:

  • 800 Gbps ZR/ZR+ optical plugs and 1.6 Tbps-capable transponders. Each will enhance capability, decrease energy consumption and scale back the associated fee per bit. The optical plugs present higher attain and might run over telcos’ reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer-based line methods.

  • Programs designed to cut back energy. Dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) reduces the variety of optics units within the hyperlink between information facilities. In information heart interconnect, using IP over DWDM is a method operators can save on energy prices within the face of superior information processing necessities.

  • Discovering methods so as to add extra spectrum for extra capability. Operators want fiber strands to hold extra capability. With the heightened want for extra bandwidth, they may discover they should add extra strands of fiber, which is not at all times doable and might trigger community congestion alongside some routes.

Associated:Revolutionizing Information Facilities: The Affect of Direct Liquid Cooling

The Severe Want for Pace

Meantime, operators proceed to check the efficiency of higher-capacity networks. Cisco and Arelion, for instance, not too long ago concluded a trial of an optical transmission system with 1.2 Tbps of capability. One other Arelion trial, this time with Ciena, accomplished a 1.6 Tbps wavelength information transmission in a reside community feed. Lastly, In mid-March, AT&T mentioned it had efficiently examined 1.6 Tbps single-carrier wavelength throughout 296 kilometers of its industrial long-distance fiber community. The wavelength — utilizing a single gentle frequency — carried two 800 GbE circuits.

Yu mentioned industrial availability of 1.6 Tbps optical gear may arrive in 2026.

Recent Gamers with Huge Fiber Community Plans

The OTN market will get one other enhance from large tech and social media giants linking their far-reaching terrestrial optical networks to subsea fiber cables.

Meta, for instance, is planning a 50,000-kilometer subsea community, whereas Google, Microsoft and others are plotting sprawling optical networks to present their information facilities the capability to course of AI and analytic workloads whilst they set the stage for quantum computing.



Media3 1.6.0 — what’s new?



Media3 1.6.0 — what’s new?

Posted by Andrew Lewis – Software program Engineer

This text is cross-published on Medium

This launch features a host of bug fixes, efficiency enhancements and new options. Learn on to seek out out extra, and as at all times please try the full launch notes for a complete overview of modifications on this launch.


Playback, MediaSession and UI

ExoPlayer now helps HLS interstitials for advert insertion in HLS streams. To play these advertisements utilizing ExoPlayer’s built-in playlist help, go an HlsInterstitialsAdsLoader.AdsMediaSourceFactory because the media supply manufacturing facility when creating the participant. For extra info see the official documentation.

This launch additionally consists of experimental help for ‘pre-warming’ decoders. With out pre-warming, transitions from one playlist merchandise to the subsequent is probably not seamless in some instances, for instance, we may have to modify codecs, or decode some video frames to succeed in the beginning place of the brand new media merchandise. With pre-warming enabled, a secondary video renderer can begin decoding the brand new media merchandise earlier, giving near-seamless transitions. You possibly can do this characteristic out by enabling it on the DefaultRenderersFactory. We’re actively engaged on additional enhancements to the way in which we work together with decoders, together with including a ‘quick looking for mode’ so keep tuned for updates on this space.

Media3 1.6.0 introduces a brand new media3-ui-compose module that comprises performance for constructing Compose UIs for playback. You’ll find a reference implementation within the Media3 Compose demo and study extra in Getting began with Compose-based UI. At this level we’re offering a primary set of foundational state lessons that hyperlink to the Participant, along with some primary composable constructing blocks. You need to use these to construct your personal custom-made UI widgets. We plan to publish default Materials-themed composables in a later launch.

Another enhancements on this launch embody: transferring system calls off the appliance’s principal thread to the background (which ought to cut back ANRs), a brand new decoder module wrapping libmpegh (for bundling object-based audio decoding in your app), and a repair for the Solid extension for apps focusing on API 34+. There are additionally fixes throughout MPEG-TS and WebVTT extraction, DRM, downloading/caching, MediaSession and extra.

Media extraction and body retrieval

The brand new MediaExtractorCompat is a drop-in alternative for the framework MediaExtractor however carried out utilizing Media3’s extractors. In case you’re utilizing the Android framework MediaExtractor, take into account migrating to get constant conduct throughout gadgets and cut back crashes.

We have additionally added experimental help for retrieving video frames in a brand new class ExperimentalFrameExtractor, which may act as a alternative for the MediaMetadataRetriever getFrameAtTime strategies. There are just a few advantages over the framework implementation: HDR enter is supported (by default tonemapping right down to SDR, however with the choice to provide HLG bitmaps from Android 14 onwards), Media3 results may be utilized (together with Presentation to scale the output to a desired dimension) and it runs sooner on some gadgets resulting from transferring coloration area conversion to the GPU. Here is an instance of utilizing the brand new API:

val bitmap =
    withContext(Dispatchers.IO) {
        val configuration =
            ExperimentalFrameExtractor.Configuration
                .Builder()
                .setExtractHdrFrames(true)
                .construct()
        val frameExtractor =
            ExperimentalFrameExtractor(
                context,
                configuration,
            )

        frameExtractor.setMediaItem(mediaItem, /*results*/ listOf())

        val body = frameExtractor.getFrame(timestamps).await()
        frameExtractor.launch()
        body.bitmap
    }

Modifying, transcoding and export

Media3 1.6.0 consists of efficiency, stability and practical enhancements in Transformer. Highlights embody: help for transcoding/transmuxing Dolby Imaginative and prescient streams on gadgets that help this format and a brand new MediaProjectionAssetLoader for recording from the display, which you’ll be able to check out within the Transformer demo app.

Take a look at Frequent media processing operations with Jetpack Media3 Transformer for some code snippets exhibiting easy methods to course of media with Transformer, and tricks to cut back latency.

This launch additionally features a new Kotlin-based demo app showcasing Media3’s video results framework. You possibly can choose from a wide range of video results and preview them by way of ExoPlayer.setVideoEffects.

Media3 video effect animation

Animation exhibiting distinction adjustment and a confetti impact within the new demo app

Get began sith Media3 1.6.0

Please get in contact by way of the Media3 situation Tracker should you run into any bugs, or in case you have questions or characteristic requests. We sit up for listening to from you!

Company renewable power contracts break annual report


Company power consumers purchased 21.7 gigawatts of renewable power in 2024, an annual report that boosted additions to the U.S. electrical grid from such transactions to 100 gigawatts since 2014. That’s based on the Clear Power Patrons Affiliation’s 2024 Deal Tracker.

For context, 1 gigawatt of electrical energy can help 750,000 U.S. households for one yr. 

Simply shy of three % of all renewable era on the U.S. grid is attributable to some type of company transaction, based on CEBA. The evaluation considers publicly reported offers which can be a minimum of 20 megawatts in capability; a minimum of 235 corporations have introduced offers since 2014. 

Firms negotiate voluntary energy buy agreements and different kinds of contracts with utilities for clear power to allow them to use them to achieve renewable power objectives and declare greenhouse gasoline emissions reductions. This observe has grow to be extra standard over the previous 5 years.

Clean Energy Buyers Association Infographic

Key takeaways from CEBA’s newest evaluation:

  • The Solar guidelines: Solar energy accounted for the overwhelming majority of the 2024 purchases — 73 % — regardless of ongoing allowing and grid interconnection delays.
  • Nuclear surprises: Firms procured 1.5 gigawatts from nuclear services, about 6.7 % of whole (in contrast with 7.7 % for wind). Nuclear power wasn’t even talked about within the 2023 Deal Tracker abstract. Each Microsoft and Amazon have signed high-profile offers up to now 12 months.
  • Batteries bloom: There was a 300 % enhance in capability throughout 2024, accounting for 7.7 % of capability added.
  • Geothermal firsts: Google’s 115-megawatt contract with Fervo in Nevada made the record. It makes use of a brand new kind of tariff to insulate different clients from the price of investing in an rising know-how.
  • Curiosity continues to develop: 20 new corporations finalized a deal in 2024, fewer than the 28 in 2023 however nonetheless notable progress.
  • Half the contracted capability is operational: 54 gigawatts have been switched on.

What’s forward

Whereas the Trump administration’s insurance policies favor fossil fuels over renewable era, clear electrical energy capability continues to develop quickly together with general world power demand. The world’s power urge for food surged 2.2 % in 2024, sooner than the common demand progress of 1.3 % between 2013 and 2023.

Low-emissions era sources coated many of the capability will increase final yr, based on the Worldwide Power Company. Whole worldwide capability is now round 700 gigawatts. Nuclear energy capability reached its fifth highest degree up to now 5 a long time, IEA reported.

Tech corporations constructing out large information facilities for synthetic intelligence are on the middle of this controversial progress. Whereas CEBA’s report doesn’t disclose or focus on particular corporations, Amazon was the single-biggest company purchaser in 2024 — for the fifth yr in a row. 

The tech firm has invested in 600 tasks up to now, together with ones in states resembling Louisiana and Mississippi which have proportions of high-emitting fossil fuels as era sources. Within the latter state, tasks backed by Amazon account for twenty-four % of photo voltaic electrical energy on the grid.