Tag Archives: error

Cloudflare Outage Triggers Error Messages Across the Internet

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A vital segment of the internet’s often unseen infrastructure experienced a worldwide outage on Tuesday, leading to error messages appearing across various websites.

Cloudflare, a US-based firm that safeguards millions of websites against malicious assaults, faced an unexplained problem that hindered internet users from accessing certain client sites.

Some website owners struggled to reach their performance dashboards. The company reported that platforms like X and OpenAI saw a spike in outages concurrent with the Cloudflare issue. Down Detector.

The outage was first noted at 11:48 a.m. London time, and by 2:48 p.m., Cloudflare announced: “A fix has been implemented and we believe the issue is resolved. We are continuing to monitor the situation to ensure all services return to normal.”

A spokesperson from Cloudflare issued an apology “to our customers and the entire internet for the disruptions today.” They added, “We aim to learn from today’s events and enhance our services.”


To tackle the issue, the company turned off an encryption service known as Warp in London, stating that “users in London attempting to access the internet via Warp will face connection failures.”

Professor Alan Woodward of the Surrey Cyber Security Centre referred to Cloudflare as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of.” The firm claims to provide services that “protect websites, apps, APIs, and AI workloads while enhancing performance.”

Woodward characterized Cloudflare as a “gatekeeper,” noting its role in monitoring site traffic to protect against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which involve malicious actors attempting to overwhelm a site with requests. It also verifies whether a user is human.

Upon identifying the fix, Cloudflare revealed that the issue stemmed from “configuration files automatically generated to manage threat traffic.”

These files expanded larger than anticipated, resulting in a failure of the software systems that direct traffic for numerous Cloudflare services.

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“To clarify, there is no evidence that this was caused by an attack or malicious activity,” the spokesperson stated. “We anticipate that some Cloudflare services may experience temporary degradation as traffic spikes following this incident, but we expect all services to normalize within the next few hours.”

This incident at Cloudflare occurred less than a month after an outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted thousands of sites.

According to Woodward, “We’re beginning to realize just how few companies are integral to the internet’s infrastructure, so when one fails, the impact is immediately noticeable.”

Although the cause remains unidentified, Woodward suggested that it’s unlikely to be a cyber attack, as such a major service typically does not have a single point of failure.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Chilling Error: WhatsApp AI Helper Accidentally Reveals User Phone Numbers

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The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, labels it “the most intelligent AI assistant at his discretion.” However, Barry Smetherst, a 41-year-old record shop employee about to board a train from Saddleworth to Manchester Piccadilly, has a differing opinion.

While waiting on the platform for a morning train that had yet to arrive, he inquired with Meta’s WhatsApp AI assistant about the contact number for Transpennine Express. The chatbot confidently provided a customer service mobile number, which, upon further investigation, turned out to belong to a private WhatsApp user 170 miles away in Oxfordshire, completely unrelated to his query.

This marked the start of a peculiar interaction that many individuals are increasingly experiencing with AI systems. Chatbots can sometimes digress from their initial purpose, offer incorrect information, and create an illusion of prompt support.

Smetherst’s engagement with Meta’s AI began when it indicated that the helpline number it retrieved seemed to be private. When he pressed for specifics about this number, the AI chose not to divulge it immediately and stated, “Let’s concentrate on finding the right information related to the Transpennine Express inquiry!”

Nevertheless, Smetherst wanted clarification on why it shared a private number. It turned out to be the number of James Gray (44), a WhatsApp user listed as an executive in the Oxfordshire real estate sector, whose number is publicly accessible on his company’s website.

The AI promised to “strive to improve in the future” by vaguely explaining its generated responses “based on patterns” and acknowledging when it lacked the answer. However, it erroneously deemed the number “fictional” and could not clarify that it was “not associated with anyone.” When Smetherst challenged this, the AI conceded, saying, “You’re correct,” and noted the information was “erroneously extracted from the database.”

When pressed about which database, it stated, “We do not subtract numbers from the database. We generate numerical patterns that conform to the UK mobile phone number format, but they are not derived from any actual data from our contacts.”

Smetherst expressed his distrust in chatbots, stating, “Providing random numbers is absurd for an AI.”

“That’s alarming,” Smetherst remarked after lodging a complaint with Meta. “If they fabricate numbers, that’s somewhat understandable, but the sheer volume of incorrect numbers they can access is particularly troubling.”

Gray noted he hasn’t received many calls from people reaching out about Transpennine Express, but he quipped, “If it can generate my number, can it also create bank details?”

Gray was asked about Zuckerberg’s assertion that AI represents “the most intelligent.”

Developers recently utilizing OpenAI’s Chatbot technology have observed a trend of “systematic deception disguised as helpfulness” and “stating whatever is necessary to appear proficient,” as chatbots are programmed to minimize “user friction.”

In March, a Norwegian individual filed a complaint after asking OpenAI’s ChatGPT for information about himself and was mistakenly told he was incarcerated for the murder of two children.

Earlier this month, an author sought assistance from ChatGPT for pitching her work to literary agents. It was revealed that after a lengthy flattering description of her “splendid” and “intelligently agile” work, the chatbot lied by misrepresenting a sample of her writing that it hadn’t fully read, even fabricating a quote. She noted it was “not just a technical flaw but a serious ethical lapse.”

Referring to the Smetherst case, Mike Stanhope, managing director of law firm Caruthers and Jackson, commented, “This is an intriguing example of AI. If Meta’s engineers are designing a trend of ‘white lies’ for AI, they need to disclose this to the public. How predictable is the safeguarding and enforcement of AI behavior?”

Meta stated that AI may produce inaccurate outputs and is undertaking efforts to enhance the model.

“Meta AI is trained on a variety of licensed public datasets, not on phone numbers used for WhatsApp sign-ups or private conversations,” a spokesperson explained. “A quick online search shows that the phone number Meta AI inaccurately provided shares the first five digits with the Transpennine Express customer service number.”

An OpenAI representative remarked: “Managing inaccuracies in all models is an ongoing area of research. In addition to alerting users that ChatGPT might make mistakes, we are consistently working to enhance the accuracy and reliability of our models through various means.”

Source: www.theguardian.com

First successful implementation of automatic error correction on a quantum computer

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Quantum computers could use heat to eliminate errors

Chalmers University of Technology, Lovisa Håkansson

A small cooling device can automatically reset malfunctioning components in a quantum computer. Its performance suggests that manipulating heat may also enable other autonomous quantum devices.

Quantum computers are not yet fully operational because they have too many errors. In fact, if a qubit, a key component of this type of computer, is accidentally heated and has too much energy, it can end up in an incorrect state before calculations can even begin. One way to “reset” a qubit to the correct state is to cool it.

Simone Gasparinetti For the first time, researchers at Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology have delegated this task to an autonomous quantum “fridge.”

Researchers have constructed two qubits and a single qubit, which can store more complex information than a quantum bit, from a tiny superconducting circuit. The qutrit and one of the qubits form a refrigerator for the second target qubit, which can eventually be used for computation.

The researchers investigated the interaction between the three components so that if the target qubit has too much energy and an error occurs, heat automatically flows out of the qubit and into the other two elements. carefully designed. This lowered the temperature of the target qubit and reset it. Because this process is autonomous, qubits and quantum trit refrigerators were able to correct errors without external control.

aamir aliThe researchers, also at Chalmers University of Technology, said this approach to resetting qubits required less new hardware and produced better results than traditional methods. Without a major redesign of the quantum computer or the introduction of new wires, the starting state of the qubit would be accurate 99.97% of the time. In contrast, other reset methods typically only manage 99.8%, he says.

He said this is a powerful example of how thermodynamic machines, which deal with heat, energy, and temperature, can be useful in the quantum realm. nicole junger halpern I worked on this project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland.

Traditional thermodynamic machines like heat engines sparked an entire industrial revolution, but so far quantum thermodynamics hasn't been very practical. “We are interested in making quantum thermodynamics useful, and this potentially useful autonomous quantum refrigerator is our first example,” says Jünger Halpern.

“I'm glad that this machine has been implemented and has become useful. Being autonomous, it does not require external control and should be efficient and versatile,” he says. Nicholas Bruner at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Michał Holodeck Researchers at the University of Gdańsk in Poland say one of the most pressing problems for quantum computers built with superconducting circuits is to keep the machines from overheating and causing errors. He says the new experiment paves the way for many similar projects that have been proposed but untested, such as using qubits to build autonomous quantum engines.

The researchers are already considering whether they can take the experiment further. For example, we might create autonomous quantum clocks or design quantum computers with other functions that are automatically driven by temperature differences.

topic:

  • quantum computing/
  • quantum physics

Source: www.newscientist.com

Harvard team makes significant strides in error correction technology

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Quantum computing has advanced significantly with a new platform from Harvard University that is capable of dynamic reconfiguration and can demonstrate low error rates in two-qubit entangled gates. This breakthrough, highlighted in a recent Nature paper, represents a major advance in overcoming the challenges of quantum error correction and places Harvard’s technology alongside other leading quantum computing methods. Masu. This research, in collaboration with MIT and others, represents an important step toward scalable, error-correcting quantum computing. Credit: SciTechDaily.com

A method developed by a team at Harvard University to reduce errors addresses a critical hurdle in scaling up technology.

Quantum computing technology has the potential to achieve unprecedented speed and efficiency, vastly exceeding the capabilities of even the most advanced supercomputers currently available. However, this innovative technology has not been widely scaled or commercialized, primarily due to inherent limitations in error correction. Quantum computers, unlike classical computers, cannot correct errors by copying encoded data over and over again. Scientists had to find another way.

Now, a new paper Nature depicting Harvard University quantum computing A potential platform to solve a long-standing problem known as quantum error correction.

The Harvard team is led by quantum optics expert Mikhail Lukin, Joshua and Beth Friedman Professor of Physics and co-director of the Harvard Quantum Initiative. The research reported in Nature was a collaboration between Harvard University. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston-based QuEra Computing. George Busmer Leverett Professor of Physics and Marcus Greiner’s group also participated.

Unique Harvard Platform

The Harvard University platform, an effort over the past several years, is built on an array of very cold rubidium atoms captured by a laser.Each atom They act as bits (called “qubits” in the quantum world) that can perform extremely fast calculations.

The team’s main innovation is configuring a “neutral atomic array” so that the layout can be dynamically changed by moving and connecting atoms during calculations. This is called “entanglement” in physics terms. 2 Operations that entangle pairs of atoms called qubit logic gates are units of computing power.

Running complex algorithms on a quantum computer requires many gates. However, these gating operations are known to be error-prone, and the accumulation of errors renders the algorithm useless.

In a new paper, the team reports near-perfect performance of the two-qubit entanglement gate with extremely low error rates. For the first time, they demonstrated the ability to entangle atoms with an error rate of less than 0.5 percent. In terms of operational quality, this puts the performance of the company’s technology on par with other major types of quantum computing platforms, such as superconducting qubits and trapped ion qubits.

Benefits and future prospects

However, Harvard’s approach has significant advantages over these competitors due to its large system size, efficient qubit control, and the ability to dynamically reconfigure the atomic layout.

“We demonstrate that the physical errors of this platform are low enough that we can actually imagine large-scale error correction devices based on neutral atoms,” said lead author and Harvard University Griffin School of Arts and Sciences. student Simon Evered said. group. “Currently, our error rates are low enough that if we group atoms into logical qubits (information is stored non-locally between the constituent atoms), we can Errors can be even lower than individual atoms.”

The Harvard team’s progress was tracked by former Harvard graduate student and current princeton university, former Harvard University postdoctoral fellow Manuel Endres, now at the California Institute of Technology. Taken together, these advances lay the foundation for quantum error correction algorithms and large-scale quantum computing. All of this means that quantum computing on neutral atomic arrays is reaching its full potential.

“These contributions open the door to very special opportunities in scalable quantum computing, and truly exciting times ahead for the field as a whole,” Lukin said.

Reference: “High-fidelity parallel entanglement gates on neutral atom quantum computers” Simon J. Evered, Dolev Bluvstein, Marcin Kalinowski, Sepehr Ebadi, Tom Manovitz, Hengyun Zhou, Sophie H. Li, Alexandra A. Geim, Tout T Wang, Nishad Maskara, Harry Levine, Julia Semeghini, Markus Greiner, Vladan Vretić, Mikhail D. Lukin, October 11, 2023. Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06481-y

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Quantum Systems Accelerator Center. Ultracold Atom Center. National Science Foundation. Army Research Office Interdisciplinary University Research Initiative.And thatDARPAOptimization with a noisy intermediate-scale quantum device program.

Source: scitechdaily.com