Last Week in tech — 5th edition

This TPAMI 2024 work extends SelfDZSR (ECCV 2022), focusing on real-world super-resolution from dual and multiple zoomed observations. Key enhancements include patch-based optical flow alignment for better data pair alignment, Local Overlapped Sliced Wasserstein (LOSW) loss for improved visual results, and a progressive fusion scheme for multiple zoomed observations. Evaluated on a larger iPhone dataset and triple zoomed images, this release also includes extensive ablation experiments. Check it out on GitHub and start enhancing your super-resolution tasks!
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Generating long and consistent videos has emerged as a significant yet challenging problem. While most existing diffusion-based video generation models, derived from image generation models, show promising performance for short videos, their simple conditioning mechanism and sampling strategy — originally designed for images — cause severe performance degradation when adapted to long video generation, leading to temporal inconsistency and overexposure. To address this, we introduce FlexiFilm, a new diffusion model tailored for long video generation. Our framework incorporates a temporal conditioner to establish a more consistent relationship between generation and multi-modal conditions, and a resampling strategy to tackle overexposure. Empirical results demonstrate FlexiFilm generates long and consistent videos, each over 30 seconds in length, outperforming competitors in both qualitative and quantitative analyses.
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A couple of months ago, an audience at a tech conference in San Francisco watched Bloomberg’s Emily Chang interview Reid Hoffman. She inquired about Microsoft’s hiring of the team behind Inflection, a would-be OpenAI competitor that Hoffman co-founded. This move, essentially an acquisition in everything but name, appeared to be designed to avoid antitrust scrutiny. Microsoft, where Hoffman serves as a board member, not only hired most of Inflection’s employees but also licensed the startup’s technology in a manner seemingly intended to satisfy its investors.

During the interview, Hoffman predicted that the Inflection scenario would become a “pattern” for future AI deals. This prediction is now unfolding. Last Friday, Amazon announced it is hiring most of the team behind Adept, another potential OpenAI competitor. Adept had raised approximately $400 million from top-tier investors to develop what CEO David Luan described as “a new type of giant model that turns natural language into actions on your machine.”

Long-undetected vulnerabilities left thousands of macOS and iOS apps vulnerable to supply-chain attacks, compromising millions of users. Fixed last October, these flaws were in a “trunk” server managing CocoaPods, a repository for Swift and Objective-C projects. EVA Information Security discovered the issues, stemming from an insecure verification email mechanism. Attackers could inject malicious code, gaining access to sensitive user data. Specific vulnerabilities included URL manipulation (CVE-2024–38367), control over abandoned pods (CVE-2024–38368), and code execution on the trunk server (CVE-2024–38366). These findings emphasize the critical need for enhanced security in app development supply chains. source

Twilio has confirmed a data breach after hackers leaked 33 million phone numbers associated with the Authy app. The ShinyHunters hackers announced the leak on the BreachForums website in late June, revealing account IDs and some non-personal data as well. Twilio’s security alert explained that an unauthenticated endpoint allowed access to the data, which has since been secured. While there’s no evidence of further system access or other sensitive data being compromised, Twilio urged Authy users to update their security and remain vigilant against phishing and smishing attacks.
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