Elon Musk’s brain chip firm Neuralink denies abuse of monkeys in its experiments

Elon's monkey business is no laughing matter. Here's today's top stories in #enterprisetech.

Elon Musk’s brain chip firm Neuralink denies abuse of monkeys in its experiments

After being accused of harming animals in its experiments, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup Neuralink today said experiments with its brain-computer interface have always been ethical. Neuralink hopes to connect human brains with computers. Sometimes the work means animals have to be used, although Neuralink says when that happens, the animals have been treated in the “most humane and ethical way possible.”

·? Nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, PCRM, said that when Neuralink was working with researchers at the University of California, the ill-treatment of animals occurred on many occasions, including macaque monkeys having “their brains mutilated in shoddy experiments” and being left to die.

·? From 2017 to 2020, university researchers making use of the $1.7 million in funding are accused of failing “to provide dying monkeys with adequate veterinary care, used an unapproved substance known as ‘BioGlue’ that killed monkeys by destroying portions of their brains, and failed to provide for the psychological well-being of monkeys assigned to the experiment.”

·? In a blog post, Neuralink responded to these claims, admitting that two monkeys had been put to death but only “to gather important histological data.” It said a further six animals were euthanized on the advice of veterinary experts. “These reasons included one surgical complication involving the use of the FDA-approved product, BioGlue, one device failure, and four suspected device-association infections,” Neuralink said.

·? Neuralink said it surpasses industry standards in how the animals are housed. It said the monkeys have a 6,000-square-foot vivarium, in which they can enjoy playtime with what it called “enrichment devices” and the animals receive around-the-clock care from a “dedicated team of veterinarians”.

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DevOps startup Shoreline brings multicloud incident automation to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud

Incident automation startup Shoreline Inc. announced today the general availability of its platform on the “big three” public clouds, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. With its launch, Shoreline said, it’s helping ease the burden on site reliability engineers and improve availability for cloud-hosted applications and services.

·? With its platform, engineers gain fleetwide visibility into their applications’ and systems’ resources and metrics. They can take action on any issues that are flagged using a Linux command or a shell script, all from the same interface.

·? To lessen the load for engineers, Shoreline says, it goes further than other incident response platforms such as PagerDuty and StackPulse. Those platforms help by automating messaging and alerts but still require human engineers to implement fixes wherever they’re needed.

·? Users will be able to debug and repair issues for all of their applications, regardless of where they’re hosted. It eliminates the need to switch between different tools to log in and out of different networks and clusters to accomplish critical tasks. The platform manages all of the overheads across those environments to provide instant access to the necessary resources, executing commands in parallel across all containers and virtual machines, thereby boosting productivity.

Ukrainian websites knocked offline ahead of possible Russian invasion

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The world faces what could turn out to be World War III, as Russian troops mass on the border with Ukraine and could invade the sovereign country this week — but Russia apparently is already marching on the internet. The best way to start an invasion is to cripple the internet and online functionality of the country you’re about to invade, and that’s exactly what is now happening in Ukraine.?

·? According to the Associated Press, a series of cyberattacks has knocked out the websites of the Ukrainian army, the defense ministry and major banks. The report claims that the sites were knocked offline via a distributed denial-of-service attack while adding that the DDoS might be “a smokescreen for more damaging cyber mischief.”

·? “As the largest Ukrainian state-owned bank was affected, the escalating Ukraine-Russia crisis again shows the power of state actors to inflict far-reaching disruption,” Quentin Wineteer Sr., federal program manager at security intelligence company LogRhythm Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “Thankfully, the outcome was just disruption and not loss in this instance. This is an emphatic reminder to global companies of the need to take a deep look at their information security posture, draw from internal security resources or lean on partnerships from industry leaders who are ready to defend against the cyberthreats of the modern world.”

·? Rick Holland, chief information security officer and vice president Strategy at digital risk protection firm Digital Shadows Ltd., noted that “threat actors with Russian affiliations have certainly leveraged massive DDoS attacks in the past, as we saw in Estonia in 2007.”

F5 launches distributed cloud services platform

F5 Inc., a leader in application delivery controllers, today announced its new software-as-a-service Distributed Cloud Services platform. The new solution is the coming together of several acquisitions, including Volterra and Shape Security. Network functions include cloud load balancing, multicloud networking, cloud-native edge computing services and a Kubernetes gateway.

·? This new service addresses the challenges associated with the shift to distributed clouds. In this model, a business would dedicate a workload to a compute resource. Workload A would run in AWS, workload B in a private cloud, workload C in Azure and so on. Although businesses used multiple clouds, all components of a specific application would reside in one cloud.

·? With multicloud, organizations can leverage multiple cloud providers to build a single app — an API from one cloud, another API from a second, store the data in a third and so on.? That’s the concept of true multicloud. Distributed clouds extend this concept to the edge, where data is moved closer to the user.

·? Once a container is invoked, F5 can deliver application delivery controller services via the cloud. API calls can be protected with the WAAP, so there’s no need for local security. The important thing for information technology pros to understand is that distributed clouds are highly dynamic and require supporting infrastructure that is equally dynamic.

Microsoft finally rolls out limited support for Android apps in Windows 11

Microsoft Corp. today rolled out limited support for Android apps in the latest beta testing preview of Windows 11. Microsoft announced support for Android apps in Windows 11 in June, the same time it surprised just about everyone that there would be a new version of Windows.

·? According to Microsoft, the Win 11 beta release of Android app support includes more than 1,000 apps and games from the Amazon App Store. Featured apps include Audible, Kindle, Subway Surfers, Lords Mobile, Khan Academy Kids and others.

·? Microsoft, despite dealing directly with Amazon, is not providing access to the Amazon App Store. Instead, the apps from Amazon are offered via the Microsoft Store.

·? There are a number of new features also coming to Windows 11. This includes a weather icon, the ability to mute and unmute any window and the ability to see the clock and date on the taskbar on a secondary monitor.