What's on Your Mind?

In 2021, Prada created “Candy,” an influencer designed to sell perfume. With an appearance rendered using then-state-of-the-art tools, Candy’s not-quite-real vibe felt straight out of the Silicon (Uncanny) Valley. It was peppy, but cartoonlike, and it was hard to see how Candy could sell perfume it could never smell. Since then, technologies have greatly improved. A brand can now render any persona with a product, create movies with that model persona animated in a realistic way, and show them demonstrating products. By creating their own influencers, brands can keep their advertising budgets down and generate profits. It’s possible that the virtual influencers will …

When AWS’s US-East-1 region went dark in late October, followed just a week later by a Microsoft Azure outage, it was yet another stark reminder that even the world’s biggest cloud vendors are not immune to failures. A simple DNS failure in AWS’s Route 53 rippled outward, knocking out applications, disrupting database services, and reminding us how dependent our tech infrastructure has become on a handful of cloud regions. With “an inadvertent tenant configuration change,” the Azure outage further highlighted the instability of some of these systems, once again demonstrating how small changes can have quite a large impact. With CyberCube estimating that the cost of …