The Daily Index — Wednesday, December 6, 2023 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

ELON MUSK’S AI STARTUP — X.AI — FILES TO RAISE $1 BILLION IN FRESH CAPITAL

X.AI has filed with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering. It has already raised nearly $135 million from four investors and has a binding and enforceable agreement for the purchase of the remaining shares. The startup released an AI chatbot with real-time knowledge of the internet called Grok last month. It aims to directly compete with companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

cnbc.com · 3 min

TLDR AI

AI ALLIANCE LAUNCHES AS AN INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY FOR SAFE AND OPEN AI

The AI Alliance, led by IBM and Meta, unites over 50 global organizations to foster open, responsible AI development. It focuses on setting AI standards, advancing hardware, and promoting AI education and skills. Members include major tech firms, universities, and research institutions. The Alliance emphasizes safety, diversity, and equitable access to AI innovation.

ai.meta.com · 5 min

TLDR Web Dev

WHAT IS JWT?

JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) are an open standard for securely sharing JSON data between parties through encoding and digital signatures. They are used for API authentication, data transfer, and authorization workflows. JWTs consist of three parts: a header, payload, and signature, and can be used to securely transmit data between various systems. While JWTs offer benefits like statelessness, efficiency, and interoperability, they also pose challenges such as security risks, token size, and limited central control.

blog.postman.com · 8 min

TLDR InfoSec

THREAT ACTORS EXPLOIT ADOBE COLDFUSION CVE-2023-26360 FOR INITIAL ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT SERVERS

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a cybersecurity advisory in response to the exploitation of CVE-2023-26360 by unidentified threat actors at a Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agency. At least two public-facing servers were compromised between June and July 2023. The advisory provides network defenders with tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), indicators of compromise (IOCs), and methods to detect and protect against similar exploitation.

cisa.gov · 13 min

TLDR Crypto

CIRCLE AND NUBANK PARTNER TO INCREASE DIGITAL DOLLAR ACCESS IN BRAZIL

Circle, the largest regulated stablecoin issuer in the US, has partnered with the global digital financial institution Nubank to increase access to digital dollars in Brazil. The partnership aims to cater to the increasing demand for secure, regulated, and direct access to digital dollars through its offerings, which reach Nubank's 85 million Brazilian users.

circle.com · 2 min

TLDR

NASA SAYS SPACEX’S NEXT STARSHIP FLIGHT COULD TEST REFUELING TECH

SpaceX and NASA may be demonstrating orbital refueling technology on the next Starship test flight. NASA has yet to make a decision on when to start testing the capability. Cryogenic propellants must be kept at super-low temperatures or they turn into a gas and boil off. Rockets using these types of propellants typically need to complete their missions within hours - NASA wants to extend this lifetime to months and enable the transfer of the propellants from one vehicle to another.

arstechnica.com · 9 min

TLDR

‘ANIMATE ANYONE’ HERALDS THE APPROACH OF FULL-MOTION DEEPFAKES

Animate Anyone uses a generative video technique to create videos from pictures of people. While its results are far from perfect, the model is a huge leap over the previous state of the art, which produced way more artifacts or completely lost important details. The team behind the model hasn't released the code for it yet. Videos showing deepfakes made with Animate Anyone are available in the article.

techcrunch.com · 4 min

TLDR

INTRODUCING STYLEX

StyleX is an expressive, deterministic, reliable, and scalable styling system. It was carefully designed to meet the requirements of large application, reusable component libraries and statically typed codebases. StyleX is fully typed and supports an expressive subset of CSS. It takes the developer experience of CSS-in-JS libraries and uses compile-time tooling to bridge it with the performance and scalability of static CSS.

stylexjs.com · 7 min

TLDR

IMESSAGE, EXPLAINED

This blog post presents a cursory overview of the internals of iMessage. It glosses over specific technical details, but links to resources to see how things are specifically implemented are provided. The post covers how Apple's Push Notification Service works, how the Identity Services keyserver makes registration requests, and message encryption.

jjtech.dev · 6 min