Here is s the info we spoke about on the Chris Smith Show on TNT today – the Cyber Wednesday segment starts from the 30 min and 45 second mark, ABC Hobart listeners – we spoke about the first three topics below!
- Last weekend, Elon Musk announced Tesla is cutting 10% of its workforce. Given its current headcount is 140,000 people, that means at least 14,000 are getting the chop – and this even includes some senior executives, as opposed to sales teams and presumably factory floor workers.
In a letter to his employees, Musk sad: “As we prepare the company for our next phase of growth, it is extremely important to look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and increasing productivity. There is nothing I hate more, but it must be done” to ensure the company is “lean, innovative and hungry for the next growth phase cycle.”
JP Morgan says this is as a result of declining demand for its electric vehicles, and the numbers bear this out: in the first three months of this year, Tesla delivered 386,810 cars, which is 53,000 fewer cars than during the first quarter of 2023, or 8.5% fewer cars, and its first first “year over year” decline since the second quarter of 2020.
Tesla placed the blame on assembly line updates in California and repeated factory shutdowns in Germany, but with the bad publicity EVs have been getting in terms of not being able to charge properly in the freezing cold US winters, mile or two long queues at charging stations to even get to a charger, long charging times, rising electricity prices, the risk of battery fires, the speed with which you can fill a tank of fuel in comparison and more, and the decline in sales is probably due to all those factors in addition to any problems with factories that Tesla is optimistically claiming.
- So, what’s the other piece of Tesla news around “Full Self Driving” that we need to know about?
This concerns Tesla misnamed FSD or “full self driving”, which is now more accurately named FSD (Supervised). In the US, the price for this per month was $199, and this has now halved to US $99 per month.
In a post from earlier today, Musk said in reply to a tweet from an account called “Whole Mars Catalog (Supervised) which said:
Musk replied:
Now, it’s important to note that Tesla’s Full Self Driving capability is not legal everywhere. My cousin has a Tesla in Hong Kong, and FSD is not available there.
According to the Drive.com.au website, Tesla Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot are legal in Australia and available to local Tesla owners, but the Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta is not.
Clearly, given the feature is now denoted with the term “Supervised”, Tesla is acknowledging the feature is not totally autonomous, despite the AI improvements that have reportedly made the system much better than it was before. A link on my site takes you to Tesla’s FAQ for Australia, showing what the allowed Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot can do in Australia.
For Autopilot, this includes:
- Traffic-Aware Cruise Control: Matches the speed of your vehicle to that of the surrounding traffic
- Autosteer: Assists in steering within a clearly marked lane, and uses traffic-aware cruise control
For Enhanced Autopilot, this includes:
- Navigate on Autopilot: Actively guides your vehicle from a highway’s on-ramp to off-ramp, including suggesting lane changes, navigating interchanges, automatically engaging the turn signal and taking the correct exit.
- Auto Lane Change: Assists in moving to an adjacent lane on the highway when Autosteer is engaged.
- Autopark: Helps automatically parallel or perpendicular park your vehicle, with a single touch.
- Summon: Moves your vehicle in and out of a tight space using the mobile app or key.
- Smart Summon: Your vehicle will navigate more complex environments and parking spaces, maneuvering around objects as necessary to come find you in a parking lot.
Last month, March 2024, Tesla started offering a free 30-day trial of FSD to every eligible Tesla owner, and it costs US $12,000 to buy a lifetime subscription to the service, which came down from US $15,000 in 2022, although it’s you only seem to be able to transfer this purchase to a new Tesla in limited circumstances.
In Australia the cost is $10,100, which is much cheaper than the price in US dollars.
At US $99 per month, with this subscription price not yet available in Australia to my knowledge, it would take 10 years in the US to break even compared with the $99 per month cost, and whether you’ll keep your Tesla for 10 years is obviously in question – and especially troublesome if you buy the full package, get a new Tesla, and then can’t transfer your FSD lifetime purchase across.
Cutting the price in half should mean more people in the US take up the feature, which means more data for Tesla’s AI to train on, which means the system gets even better, over time.
Still, it seems like a fully self driving car is a long way off yet, even if Elon Musk is promising news of Tesla self-driving robo-taxis being announced on the 8th of August – which will be around 5 years after Musk first promised robo-taxis would arrive.
- Are EVs falling out of favour in Australia? The Australian Automobile Association says sales are growing strongly, but hybrid sales were larger than EV sales in the first quarter of this year.
The quarterly update of the AAA’s EV Index shows Australians are continuing to shift towards electric vehicles and that internal combustion engines’ (ICE) market share continues to decline.
Battery electric vehicle (BEV) and hybrid new vehicle sales continue to grow. Both segments recorded record market share in the three months to 31 March, but battery electric vehicles were outsold by hybrids, which recorded record sales volume and market share of 11.95%.
Why this is so is obvious – you get the benefits of electric power when driving at slower speeds around the city, but when your engine is needed to drive longer distances or your battery is flat – the engine, powered by petrol, comes to life and saves the day.
The AAA EV Index online data dashboard, produced by Australia’s peak motoring body, analyses all new light vehicle sales across the country.
In national new light vehicle sales from Q4 2023 to Q1 2024:
- ICE sales fell by 8.03% and ICE market share dropped to 78.18%, going below 80% for the first time
-nBEV sales continued to grow strongly, reaching 8.70% market share, but they were outsold by hybrids, which recorded record sales volume and market share (11.95%) - Plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) and hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (HFCEVs) still have very small market shares. Collectively, ICE vehicles, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and hybrids accounted for 98.7% of the quarter’s total new light vehicle sales.
- From Q4 to Q1, national light vehicle sales declined by 3.54%, but year-on-year (31 March 2023 to 31 March 2024) total sales rose 13.91%.
“Over that period, BEV market share rose from 6.77% to 8.70% and total BEV sales rose from 17,396 to 25,468. The strongest quarters for total BEV sales and markets share were Q2 2023 and Q1 2024.
“In the first half of 2023, BEVs outsold hybrids, but since then hybrids have outsold BEVs in three consecutive quarters, accounting for 11.95% of all light vehicle sales (rising from 9.46% in Q4 2023 and up from 6.26% in Q1 last year).
“Hybrid sales volume rose by 117% in the 12 months from the end of 31 March 2023 to 31 March 2024.”
- X will now start charging new users a small fee to post, in a bid to battle the bots, and in New Zealand the price is $1 per year.
A post has emerged on X showing the following text from someone joining X as a new user, which states:
“New accounts are required to pay a small annual fee before you’re able to post, like, bookmark, and reply. This is to reduce spam and to create a better experience for everyone. You can still follow accounts and browse X for free.”
This policy Twas previously only active in New Zealand and the Philippines, and was initially being tested to help reduce spam and improve the experience for users overall.
In response, Musk said:
Musk followed up with:
The onslaught of fake accounts also uses up the available namespace, so many good handles are taken as a result.
Back in October 2023, the official X support account said:
“Starting today, we’re testing a new program (Not A Bot) in New Zealand and the Philippines. New, unverified accounts will be required to sign up for a $1 annual subscription to be able to post & interact with other posts. Within this test, existing users are not affected.
“This new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver.
“And so far, subscription options have proven to be the main solution that works at scale.”
Whether it will actually see any meaningful cuts to bots is yet to be seen – certainly all of Musk’s existing anti-bit activity has only made a small dent into the problem before the bots are back, and worse than ever.
- So how much bot activity is there on the Internet as a whole? Surely it’s only a small fraction of total traffic – or is it much worse than we suspect?
Well, the results are quite surprising! French aerospace, space, defence, security and transportation company Thales has a division called Imperva, which has just released its 2024 Bad Bot report.
The report shows NEARLY HALF (49.6%) of all internet traffic came from bots in 2023 — a 2% increase over the previous year, and the highest level Imperva has reported since it began monitoring automated traffic in 2013.
For the fifth consecutive year, the proportion of web traffic associated with bad bots grew to 32% in 2023, up from 30.2% in 2022, while traffic from human users decreased to 50.4%. Automated traffic is costing organisations billions (USD) annually due to attacks on websites, APIs, and applications.
The report, which is linked to right now at TechAdvice.Life, lists many areas of concern, but one worth noting revolves around the growing use of generative AI connected to the rise in simple bots.
Here we’re told “Rapid adoption of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) resulted in the volume of simple bots increasing to 39.6% in 2023, up from 33.4% in 2022. The technology uses web scraping bots and automated crawlers to feed training models, while enabling nontechnical users to write automated scripts for their own use.”
Every industry has a bot problem:
“For a second consecutive year, Gaming (57.2%) saw the largest proportion of bad bot traffic. Meanwhile, Retail (24.4%), Travel (20.7%), and Financial Services (15.7%) experienced the highest volume of bot attacks. The proportion of advanced bad bots, those that closely mimic human behavior and evade defenses, was highest on Law & Government (75.8%), Entertainment (70.8%), and Financial Services (67.1%) websites.”
An Imperva spokesperson said: “Automated bots will soon surpass the proportion of internet traffic coming from humans, changing the way that organisations approach building and protecting their websites and applications. As more AI-enabled tools are introduced, bots will become omnipresent. Organisations must invest in bot management and API security tools to manage the threat from malicious, automated traffic.”
So, even more money needs to be spent by companies to defend not only themselves and their intellectual properly, but their customers – which means all of us – and which adds to rising prices.
- A warning on fake invoices has been issued today, which results in “payment redirection scams” where a legitimate invoice – or a fake one – has the payment made to bank account details that are fraudulent. What are the details?
The ACCC’s Scamwatch site advises:
The warning was reported again today because a cyber security researcher discovered a database from a company called “Smoke Alarm Solutions” was able to be accessed over the Internet, and while the database has now been taken offline, reports say the details of 800,000 customers were accessible, adding to all of the data stolen not only in the recent Optus and Medibank hacks, but all the other hacks that seem to happen on practically a daily basis.
The ScamWatch site lists how the scam works:
- You get an email invoice from a business you’ve been dealing with.
- The email comes from the real business email address, because scammers have accessed their systems – or the business email address has slightly changed.
- Scammers have changed the payment details on the invoice, directing your money to a fraudulent account.
- If you reply to the email to ask about the payment details, the scammer will respond, ‘explaining’ the change.
- Using the payment details on the fake invoice, you pay the money.
- Your payment goes through, but your money goes to the scammer’s account – not the real business you think you’ve paid.
- You don’t notice that anything is wrong. Then the real business contacts you, asking for the money you’ve unknowingly paid to the scammers.
How to spot a scam?
Fake invoice scams are hard to spot. This is because:
- the scammer will hack the business’ email system or impersonate their email address
- a fake invoice looks real and may have the business logo and ABN
-the email might look just like other emails from the business, and may appear in the same email or conversation history.
-nYou need to check the fake invoice against a real business email or invoice. A fake invoice has different payment or banking details, or a different BSB and account number to the real business.
Call the business from the number on its own site and check all of the details first. Don’t just use the number that pops up in a Google search, scammers have been known to take out ads that list numbers which leads to fake calls centres.
Be especially wary of unexpected emails that list your full name, and list a purchase of 10 years of an Internet security product, or a purchase of an expensive item from an online store like Amazon, which then has the telltale notice along the lines of “if you have any queries about this purchase, give us a call on XYZ number.”
- Chipmaker AMD, which is the big competitor to Intel, has just launched new AI-enhanced chips for business laptops and desktop computers with nearly 50% faster performance than Intel’s chips. Last week we spoke about how PC sales were growing again and nearly back to pre-pandemic levels in the first quarter of this year… so what does an AI PC do again that my existing computer won’t?
Ok, so with an AI PC you can leverage the ability to create professional documents, correspondence, and business presentations from just a few bullet points, and summarise and respond to emails, create graphics and other content – and do as much of that locally on your own computer, rather than having that sent to someone else’s cloud service for privacy reasons – freeing up valuable time during the day.
Existing computers can do this by leveraging service like ChatGPT, but your request is sent to ChatGPT’s servers, and there’s no guarantee your private information won’t be shared with its AI brain and used to help other consumer or business users out there, which is why many companies like Samsung, Apple and others have been workers from using these commercial services.
AMD’s new AI chips, the Ryzen 8000 and 8000 Pro series are designed for business computers and laptops, and by the end of the year, more than 150 different systems will be available from a range of vendors, including HP, Lenovo and others.
AMD is promising its chips are nearly 50% faster than Intel’s best, while using less power, and usually they cost less money too, making them very attractive to business users who are upgrading their fleets, or just simply need to buy staff members new computers at different times.
Naturally, AMD is claiming to be the leaders in AI PCs, which is like a red rag to the bulls at Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and others, but just as things like voice to text were once only possible with an Internet connection, but can now be done by your phone even if it is offline, without a SIM card nor connected to Wi-Fi, so too are these generative AI features coming to our home and business computers.
Ultimately it will be just like the book from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – your device, be it phone, computer or other device – will have an AI brain inside that can answer virtually any question – and reach out to the Internet when it needs the most up-to-date information.
- Samsung takes the top spot in smartphone sales in the first three months of 2024, marking three quarters of rising sales, showing smartphone sales are back on the increase – but Apple, which was top dog at the end of last year, is back to the No. 2 spot. Apple still makes the biggest profits though.
Global smartphone shipments increased 7.8% year over year to 289.4 million units 1Q24, according to industry analyst IDC, which is a lot of new phones that people have purchased in just three months.
While inflationary and other economic challenges remain in many markets, the slump from sales brought forward during the pandemic is clearly over.
Now, while Apple sold the most phones of any vendor in the last quarter of last year, which reflects the time period when new iPhones come to market, Samsung has regained the top spot this year, with 20.8% of the market, Apple with 17.3%, Chinese brand Xiaomi in third spot with 14.1%. A manufacturer called Transsion, which markets to emerging markets and makes its phones in China, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, with brands you’ve never heard of such as Tecno, iTel and Infinix, is in fourth spot, has grown to take the fourth spot with 9.9%, and Oppo is in fifth spot with 8.7%. A selection of other brands takes up 29.3% of the market, but this is a range of smaller brands and manufacturers.
Huawei would be part of that 29.3%, and its Mate 60 series launched last year was blamed for a steep decline of iPhone sales in China, with Huawei also teasing new AI-enhanced successors to come, given the AI craze.
In short, however, while Samsung is back in top spot, most of those vendors get their sales from mid-range phones that don’t have anywhere near the profit margin that iPhones generate for Apple.
Apple by far is the profit leader, something players like Samsung try to emulate, and certainly it does very well with its Galaxy S and folding phone flagships, but those A series phones we spoke of a few weeks ago that are well under $1000 make up the bulk of Samsung’s sales, even if it does sell more of its flagships than it did the year before.
- We’re about half way into the 5G era, with 6G expected to start being widely available from around 2030 onwards, so what’s the latest news on 6G developments, and how much faster will it be?
Four big Japanese companies, including NTT Docomo, NEC and Fujitsu have announced they have created a wireless device capable of ultra-high-speed 100 Gbps transmissions.
They’ve been working on R&D since 2021 in anticipation of the coming 6G era, but to date, these frequencies can only be sent at distances of up to 100 metres, while 3G, 4G and 5G phones can send and receive signals at much longer distances, so there’s either a lot more work to be done, or we are going to need a lot more phone towers around the place, which people, generally speaking, haven’t been too happy to have near where they live – even though everyone wants the best and fastest phone and mobile data signal they can have.
So, how fast is 100 gigabits per second? 100Gps is 100,000 megabits per second, or 1000 times faster than the 100Mbps connections many people have with the NBN, and obviously 2000 times faster than the 50Mbps connections many also have.
Now, 5G services can theoretically reach a 4.9Gbps speeds, which is a theoretical maximum of 20 times faster, but in the real world, consumers are getting 100mbps to 600mbps on their 5G phones, and often closer to the 100mbps range, or less, depending on where you are in a building, or how close you are to a tower, etc.
So… work continues on making 6G a reality, and in about 5 years we’ll start seeing the first phones with 6G built-in and the 6G hype starting, but until then, we’ll keep you updated when new developments arise.
- Australian businesses are experiencing hours of downtime due to the failure of “fixed line fibre networks” – is this going to mean wireless connections, at least as a backup, are going to become even more important?
Wireless network equipment maker Cradlepoint says research has found 57% of Australian businesses experienced up to two hours of downtime per week due to fixed line fibre network failure in the last 12 months.
Computer Daily News reports :More than a quarter of Aussie businesses experienced up to four hours downtime per week for the same reasons.
“The research found the business cost of connectivity failure is high, with operational inefficiencies and higher operational costs. Over 40 percent of organisations said they were the top areas of impact of network downtime.
“The survey also revealed that more than 40% of Australia’s businesses experienced a network security attack in the last 12 months. Of those that were the target of a network security attack, over a quarter suffered a major security breach which resulted in loss of data and over 20 percent resulted in significant company fines.
“More than 50% of Australian companies surveyed said network security was a connectivity priority. This was followed by network resilience, bandwidth and speed, and network segmentation capabilities.”
