06Jun

The internet had a bad day last Tuesday, June 8th when a massive internet outage wiped out many of the world’s biggest website.

Fastly, the company behind the outage, apologized for the outage in a blog post saying that an “undiscovered software bug” in its code was triggered by routine activity by a single customer. The bug took down 85% of the company’s network.

“Even though there were specific conditions that triggered this outage, we should have anticipated it,” Nick Rockwell, Fastly’s senior vice president of engineering and infrastructure, said in the blog post. “We provide mission critical services, and we treat any action that can cause service issues with the utmost sensitivity and priority.”

Fastly was able to detect the service outage within one minute and restored most of the sites within an hour. Rockwell confirmed that the company is doing a postmortem of their processes and practices during the outage, and they will figure out why testing didn’t detect the bug when it had appeared during a software update on May 12.

The Importance of Internet Infrastructure

The Fastly outage, which took down mega-giant websites like Amazon, Spotify, The New York Times, and more, underscores on the importance of these little-known infrastructure sites that are behind our daily use of the web.

The increased dependence on the web for things like grocery deliveries, work, school, and health care in the pandemic era has also increased the potential for major outages like Tuesday’s disruption to do real-world harm.

“This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them,” Rockwell said in the blog post.

A Surge in Tech Hiring

Many experts say that we shouldn’t expect this recent outage to be the last.

Thankfully, US companies seem to be recognizing the importance of building reliable tech and infrastructure teams, as the nation becomes even more reliant on the internet as a result of the pandemic.

According to the Q1 2021 Tech Job Report from Dice, a DHI Group, Inc. brand, tech job postings were up 28% nationwide. “The strong quarter caps off four solid months of growth in tech job postings, presenting encouraging news for skilled technologists and a promising outlook for the tech hiring landscape,” the company stated in a recent press release.

Looking for a job in Information Technology? Check out new opportunities in infrastructure, web development, and more on our jobs page.

Anthropic Unveils Claude 3: Redefining AI Chatbots with Enhanced Capabilities

Anthropic, the AI startup backed by Google and with substantial venture capital, has just introduced the latest iteration of its GenAI technology: Claude 3. This announcement marks a significant advancement in AI capabilities, positioning Claude 3 as a formidable competitor even against OpenAI’s GPT-4.

Advanced Capabilities

According TechCrunch, “Claude 3, as Anthropic’s new GenAI is called, is a family of models — Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus, Opus being the most powerful. All show “increased capabilities” in analysis and forecasting, Anthropic claims, as well as enhanced performance on specific benchmarks versus models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 (but not GPT-4 Turbo) and Google’s Gemini 1.0 Ultra (but not Gemini 1.5 Pro).”

Multimodal Functionality

One notable feature of Claude 3 is its multimodal functionality, enabling it to analyze both text and images. This capability, like some iterations of GPT-4 and Gemini, allows Claude 3 to process various visual data such as, “…photos, charts, graphs and technical diagrams, drawing from PDFs, slideshows and other document types.” TechCrunch went further to note, “In a step one better than some GenAI rivals, Claude 3 can analyze multiple images in a single request (up to a maximum of 20). This allows it to compare and contrast images, notes Anthropic.” However, Anthropic has imposed limits on image processing to address ethical concerns, “Anthropic has disabled the models from identifying people…”

Claude 3’s Limitations

While Claude 3 showcases remarkable advancements, it’s not without limitations. TechCrunch reported that, “…the company admits that Claude 3 is prone to making mistakes with “low-quality” images (under 200 pixels) and struggles with tasks involving spatial reasoning (e.g. reading an analog clock face) and object counting (Claude 3 can’t give exact counts of objects in images).” Anthropic promises frequent updates to Claude 3, aiming to enhance its capabilities and address existing limitations. These updates will include improvements in following multi-step instructions, structured output generation, and multilingual support, making Claude 3 more responsive and adaptable to user needs.

As Anthropic continues to innovate and expand their offerings, the company remains dedicated to fostering a transparent and responsible approach to AI development. With substantial backing and a clear roadmap for future enhancements, Anthropic is poised to share the future of AI-driven solutions and pave the way for transformative advancements in various domains.

If you’re looking to take your career to the next level be sure to check out our IT page.

Businesses Are Seeing The Value of Blockchain Sample

Now organizations in sectors well beyond the pioneers in finance are investing in blockchain to protect data, decentralize processes and facilitate asset and data transfer.

“It’s an appealing model for many sectors, promising transparency and trust as it helps make value exchange possible,” says a SmartBrief article. Although focusing mostly on the financial sector, which is where blockchain found its earliest uses, the article mentions the steady creep of the technology into other industries and even slowly becoming commoditized as “blockchain as a service.”

“Amazon and Microsoft both currently offer BaaS, and enterprises as well as startups are taking advantage of it,” says SmartBrief. Citing a Gartner survey of CIOs, the article notes that “60% expected their firms to start or continue adopting blockchain-based technology between now and 2023.”

Earlier this year, Deloitte issued a blockchain trends report. Besides describing the evolving technology and the features each different approach offers, Deloitte found that some of the fastest growth in blockchain investments was coming in such unexpected industries as professional services – a sector that includes the staffing and employment industry – and energy and resources. In each of those 38% and 43% respectively of the firms surveyed were spending at least $5 million each on blockchain initiatives.

Not unexpectedly, the largest percentage of businesses investing in blockchain were in technology, media and telecom.

“More organizations in more sectors — such as technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, health care, and government — are expanding and diversifying their blockchain initiatives,” Deloitte observes.

Like the financial sector, life sciences and health care deal with highly sensitive medical data they must protect or face legal consequences. Those two sectors are where blockchain “can have a more immediate and meaningful impact,” says Deloitte. They are in an industry, the report explains, “In which data transparency, speed of access, immutability, traceability, and trustworthiness can provide the information necessary for life-altering decisions.”

Interestingly, Gartner assigns a similar importance – not life or death, but still vital – to blockchain’s value to media.

“Organizations and governments are now turning to technology to help counter fake news, for example, by using blockchain technology to authenticate news photographs and video, as the technology creates an immutable and shared record of content that ideally is viewable to consumers,” Gartner said.

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