Technology
Blizzard book Play Nice reveals dozens of canceled games
As the company behind immensely popular games like World of Warcraft, Diablo IV, and Overwatch 2, Blizzard Entertainment has always been one of gaming’s megapowers. Now, a new book delves into the company’s long and complicated history. Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, is the latest book from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. It begins at Blizzard’s creation, goes through its success with hits like Warcraft III, and culminates with its recent struggles, including feuds with parent company Activision, the 2021 sexual harassment lawsuit, and the impact of Microsoft’s 2023 acquisition of the company.
It’s a fantastic read, and I highly recommend you pick a copy up for yourself. It gives great insight into what studios gain and lose when becoming one of the most popular companies in the video game industry. For fans of Blizzard, there are some especially juicy tidbits to learn, including a long list of canceled projects from the developer’s long history. I’ve compiled every canceled project featured in the book, from StarCraft: Ghost to Odyssey, but you can learn much more about the projects and the context around them in Play Nice.
Denizen
Denizen is described as “a dungeon-crawler that was shelved due to lack of resources.” Not much more is known about it.
Bloodlines
Bloodlines was a “space vampire” game in development at Blizzard. Play Nice reveals it was canceled because it “didn’t resonate with enough staff to justify its existence.”
Pax Imperia 2 and Crixa
Blizzard Entertainment attempted to publish games made by other developers in the 1990s. This included a sequel to the empire-building real-time strategy game Pax Imperia: Eminent Dominant and a “top-down shooter made by a small studio in Boston” called Crixa. Both were canceled, although Play Nice doesn’t go into specifics as to why they were canned.
Shattered Nations
James Phinney, a lead designer at Blizzard, tried to get a turn-based strategy game called Shattered Nation off the ground at Blizzard in the 1990s. It was inspired by Sid Meier’s Civilization series of video games. It was ultimately canceled because Blizzard founder Allen Adham didn’t want Blizzard to make a turn-based video game.
A Star Wars RTS
At one point, Blizzard co-founder Allan Adham told employees that the studio was “in early discussions” to create a Star Wars strategy game. “Before they could even build a prototype, Adham came back with news that their Star Wars game wasn’t happening after all,” Play Nice subsequently reveals. Former LucasArts President Jack Sorensen told Schreier he “didn’t recall having any discussions with Blizzard about making a Star Wars game.” Instead of creating a Star Wars RTS, Blizzard continued to develop the sci-fi RTS idea, which eventually resulted in StarCraft.
Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans
Play Nice touches on the well-known story of Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, a LucasArts-inspired strategy game that followed the story of Thrall. While the game has since leaked online in full, Blizzard never officially released it, but that was not for lack of trying. They worked on it for two years, but felt that “the art style seemed amateurish and the puzzles weren’t quite clicking.” The book even includes an anecdote about Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe playing the game at a trade show and lamenting, “If you guys can’t make this work, then who can?”
Sorcerer and Zork Zero designer Steve Meretzky was brought in to see if there was a way to save the game and increase its quality without spending much more money. Meretzky would write up design documents on how to improve the game, but a few weeks after doing so, he got a call that Blizzard had canceled the game. “The cancellation cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Adham and [former CEO Michael] Morhaime knew that if Blizzard ever released a product that was widely perceived as subpar, it would destroy the company’s reputation,” Play Nice concludes about Warcraft Adventures’ cancellation. The whole game has leaked and been remastered by fans; you can watch a full playthrough below.
Fugitive Studios’ 3D action RPG
Amid frustrations with Blizzard over events that you should read Play Nice to learn more about, over a dozen developers — including James Phinney, Jesse McReynolds, Eric Flannum, Robert Djordjevich, and Maxx Marshall, and Justin Thavirat — left Blizzard. They founded a new company called Fugitive Studios and attempted to make a 3D action RPG, but it failed due to design and technological overambition and the fact that “one of their business partners turned out to be unreliable.” Fugitive Studios shut down within a year, and some of its developers returned to Blizzard.
Warcraft: Legends
Programmer Mike O’Brien was the main driving force behind Blizzard’s Battle.net, so he got to pitch his own project. It was Warcraft: Legends, a 3D spinoff where players didn’t have to worry about constructing bases, had fewer and more powerful units to command, and did so from an over-the-shoulder camera perspective. It was called a “role-playing strategy” game by Blizzard when it was announced in September 1999. Ahead of that announcement, Warcraft: Legends was rebranded to Warcraft III, but this may have been the death knell for the project.
Other Blizzard staff did not want Legends becoming Warcraft III as “they wanted to advance the real-time strategy genre, not develop something else entirely, according to the book.” Because O’Brien had “made a few too many enemies” at Blizzard, he could not get enough people on his side to support his vision. He would be removed from the project after a year and left Blizzard with fellow employees Jeff Strain and Pat Wyatt to start what would eventually become Guild Wars developer ArenaNet.
Diablo for Game Boy
After the release of Diablo II, a lot of Blizzard North’s leadership took sabatticals or had a very laid-back management style when present. Play Nice says this meant that there were some developers who “broke off to follow whims that never materialized, like a version of Diablo for Nintendo’s Game Boy.”
Starblo
Blizzard North co-founder David Brevik eventually decided to helm “Project X,” a new IP for the studio. Brevik had trouble settling on a concept because he was burnt out. After two years, Project X became Starblo, which, as its title suggests, “was a sci-fi take on Diablo” where players would “hop in a spaceship and travel between planets, collecting new guns and battling aliens as they traversed the stars.”
Unfortunately, Starblo would not see the light of day after Blizzard North’s leadership, frustrated with a lack of communication and uncertainty with the company, threatened to resign. While this move was meant to be a bluff, Blizzard parent company Vivendi accepted their resignations and forced them out of Blizzard North. Starblo was canceled as a result.
The first version of Diablo III
The original version of Diablo III, which emerged around the same time as Project X, was inspired by Ultima Online and a 3D MMORPG where “hundreds, if not thousands of people would be able to interact and play together.” After the turmoil at Blizzard North around Starblo, the game was scaled back to be closer to Diablo II. The project also struggled as it constantly changed direction due to feedback from different Blizzard executives. In the summer of 2005, Blizzard North was shut down, and the development of Diablo III moved to Blizzard proper in Irvine, California.
Nomad
In 1998, cinematics department developer Duane Stinnett pitched a game called Nomad. It was a postapocalyptic game inspired by Necromunda that had some “outlandish concept art featuring surreal depictions of turtles and ostriches.” Stinnett struggled to fully form and explain how its gameplay would work, so Blizzard decided to pursue a Warcraft MMO inspired by EverQuest instead. That project would become World of Warcraft.
The Lord of the Rings and Marvel MMOs
Vivendi Games executive Bruce Hack canceled MMOs based on Marvel and The Lord of the Rings to focus on World of Warcraft. Both franchises would eventually get MMOs from different game developers.
StarCraft: Ghost
A former LucasArts and Blizzard developer named Robert Huebner started Nihilistic Software and pitched a third-person StarCraft shooter for consoles. This project would become the now-infamous StarCraft: Ghost, which followed a Terran agent named Nova. Play Nice explains that “the loose, interactive process that had been great for early production made it tough to lock down ideas as the game entered proper development” and that it constantly switched between being a stealth and action game under Nihlisitc.
Blizzard removed Nihilistic Software from the project in June 2004, and the project was given to Metal Arms: Glitch in the System developer Swingin’ Ape Studios. Swingin’ Ape started development from scratch and took inspiration from Halo as itshifted focus to prioritize multiplayer. Blizzard acquired Swingin’ Ape in May 2005, but the single-player part of StarCraft: Ghost especially was not ready as the next generation of consoles approached. Blizzard “indefinitely postponed” the project in March 2006.
Hearthstone and Marvel Snap’s Ben Brode, who worked for Blizzard’s creative development department at the time, tried to convince Blizzard to release the multiplayer portion of StarCraft: Ghost as a budget Xbox Live title. That didn’t happen, with Brode telling Schreier, “Blizzard was not very good at jumping on opportunities.”
Other Swingin’ Ape prototypes
After StarCraft: Ghost didn’t pan out because it was for last-generation consoles, Swingin’ Ape pitched some other projects as Blizzard’s console division. One such idea was “creating a different StarCraft spinoff,” but Swingin’ Ape was eventually shut down so Blizzard could refocus on World of Warcraft.
Avalon
Diablo III director Jay Wilson and Left 4 Dead designer Mike Booth came up with an idea to “do for Minecraft what World of Warcraft had done to EverQuest: take the core idea, fix everything they didn’t like about it, and give it the Blizzard polish.” They started prototyping a game called Avalon. Wilson had to take a sabbatical as he battled depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder in the wake of the deluge of harassment and death threats he received over Diablo III’s rocky launch. Wilson left the Avalon team and started working on World of Warcraft when he returned to Blizzard. Avalon was eventually canceled.
A second Diablo III expansion
The Diablo III team brainstormed ideas for a second expansion; unfortunately, the team was told in an all-hands meeting prior to Reaper of Souls’ launch that Diablo III would not get a second expansion even if Reaper of Souls performed well. Play Nice asserts Diablo III was abandoned because they “saw Diablo III as a failure” and “didn’t think Reaper of Souls would be good enough to turn it around.” Diablo III: Reaper of Souls is a beloved expansion that sits at 87 on Metacritic. “Morhaime and other Blizzard executives would later privately admit that canceling Diablo III’s second expansion before Reaper of Souls even came out had been a tactical error,” Play Nice reveals.
Hades
Team 3 Director Josh Mosqueira was given free rein to explore what was next for the Diablo franchise. First was a game code-named Hades. “The camera would be over-the-shoulder rather than isometric; the combat would be punchier, akin to the Batman: Arkham series; and the game would have permadeath,” Play Nice explains. Unfortunately, Team 3 struggled to adapt the Batman: Arkham combat formula to multiplayer, and Mosqueira became hard to track down. Blizzard decided to restart Diablo IV from scratch after Mosqueira left Blizzard in July 2016.
WoW: TCG Online
Blizzard worked with Upper Deck to create the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game and eventually planned to make a digital version after hiring director Cory Jones. They wanted to “make playing as frictionless as possible” and called it WoW: TCG Online. Eventually, the development team concluded that there were some “serious flaws” with the physical card game that would become even more obvious in a digital version. They headed in a new direction that eventually resulted in Hearthstone.
A Blizzard-made DOTA 2
After the player-created Defense of the Ancients map and game mode became very popular, Play Nice reveals that Blizzard considered “creating an official version of DOTA for Warcraft III or even developing a sequel in-house.” But when they tried to recruit DOTA designer Icefrog, Blizzard did not want to accommodate his list of requests that included full creative control. Blizzard ultimately ignored the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) trend that DOTA kicked off. In the years that followed, Riot Games released League of Legends, which became very popular and resulted in the poaching of several Blizzard developers. Icefrog would work with Valve to make DOTA 2.
Blizzard All-Stars
Blizzard All-Stars was the first iteration of Heroes of the Storm, created in StarCraft 2’s map editor. Blizzard considered releasing it around the same time as the Heart of the Swarm expansio,n but eventually decided it would be better served as a standalone game. Heroes of the Storm failed to become as popular as League of Legends or DOTA 2.
World of StarCraft
After the success of World of Warcraft, a similar treatment for Starcraft was considered. “The natural next step seemed like a World of StarCraft, but they struggled to envision StarCraft lore fitting into an MMORPG, so instead they decided to develop a new fictional universe,” Play Nice reveals.
Titan
That new fictional universe would be Titan, a game where players control superhero characters in their everyday and heroic lives. Unfortunately, there were political battles behind the scenes between Chris Metzen and Rob Pardo, so Titan constantly changed direction, and little progress was made. Metzen wanted a superhero universe similar to Marvel and DC, while Pardo wanted its characters to be more like secret agents or spies.
The idea was that there would be “Titan Town” where players didn’t focus on combat and did things more similar to Animal Crossing, and a separate part of the game with combat based around different superhero character classes. Blizzard had trouble connecting those two parts of the game to create a compelling core gameplay loop and was hampered by lackluster development tools. In 2013, the project was rebooted and eventually became Overwatch, but this MMO development misfire cost Blizzard over $80 million.
An Overwatch MMO
Jeff Kaplan initially had ambitious plans for the Overwatch franchise. “They’d start with this first game, which was limited to player-versus-player multiplayer, then add a story and computer-controlled enemies for the sequel before culminating in an Overwatch MMORPG that would finally execute on the vision of Titan,” Play Nice says of Kaplan’s overarching vision of Overwatch. That’s not how the franchise ended up evolving over time.
Orbis
As part of an incubation program Allan Adham started after returning to Blizzard in 2016, a Warcraft game that played like Pokemon Go, code-named Orbis, was in development. Orbis was eventually canceled because of developer attrition, its scope creep, the pandemic, and unengaging combat.
Odyssey
Another incubation project, Odyssey, was conceived as Blizzard’s take on the survival game genre. Its first prototype used Unreal Engine, and Activision executives liked it, but problems emerged when it switched to a new internal engine called Synapse. Ubisoft’s Dan Hay was brought in to lead development, and its team grew to over 200 developers. Blizzard even publicly teased Odyssey, but it continued to face problems with its design and technology and got canceled following layoffs in January 2024.
Orion
Play Nice describes Orion as “an experimental mobile RPG with asynchronous turns. It was helmed by former Hearthstone director Eric Dodds and a few of his old Team 5 colleagues.” It was fun to play in a room with others, but less fun on the go, as turns could take hours. It was canceled in favor of dedicating more resources to Diablo IV and Overwatch 2.
Ares
StarCraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm director Dustin Browder was working on a first-person StarCraft shooter code-named Ares. It was “heavily inspired by EA’s Battlefield” and was in development for over three years with over 50 developers. However, it was canceled because Activision executives disliked Battlefield and were ambivalent toward StarCraft. Like Orion, its staff was moved to Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 development.
The original version of WarCraft III: Reforged
Warcraft III: Reforged was originally an ambitious reimaging of the RTS. It would’ve had a rewritten script to bring its lore more in line with World of Warcraft’s and some missions and characters would have been rdesigned. These concepts were eventually dropped due to a lack of time and funding, and Warcraft III: Reforged was hated upon its release in January 2020.
Warcraft IV, StarCraft 3, and a Call of Duty RTS
Blizzard developer Tim Morton attempted to get a new RTS game greenlit at Blizzard multiple times in the late 2010s. He floated ideas for Warcraft IV, StarCraft III, and even a Call of Duty RTS. None of these ideas could get off the ground, so Morten eventually left Blizzard Entertainment to create Stormgate at Frost Giant Studios.
A turn-based StarCraft
Play Nice briefly mentions that Allen Adham worked on a canceled “turn-based StarCraft game in the style of Civilization” as an incubation project.
Andromeda
Andromeda is described as a “high-fidelity action game, like Sony’s God of War, in the Warcraft universe.” When creative director Alex Afrasiabi was let go from Blizzard due to “misconduct in his treatment of other employees,” the project was canceled.
Diablo, Overwatch, and StarCraft Netflix shows
Activision Blizzard Studios had been working with Netflix to create shows based on Diablo, Overwatch, and StarCraft. These shows were canceled, potentially because Netflix poached Activision Cheif Financial Officer Spencer Neumann.
Neptune
NetEase, the company that made Diablo Immortal, also worked with Blizzard on a mobile spinoff of World of Warcraft set in a different era than the PC MMO. This project, code-named Neptune, was canceled in spring 2022 because Blizzard and NetEase’s contract negotiations were not going well, and China had frozen the release of any new video games.
Overwatch 2’s Hero Mode
Most of Overwatch 2’s development focused on PvE content, but only some was released. A replayable Hero Mode was canceled in May 2023 so Blizzard could focus on its multiplayer component. Some story missions were released in August 2023, but it does not appear Blizzard will release any more of them.
Servers computers
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Technology
Nvidia makes 7 tech announcements in Washington D.C.
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Nvidia showed off its technology in Washington, D.C. today at its AI Summit to help educate the nation’s capital.
The world’s biggest maker of AI chips made seven big announcements at the summit, and we’ll summarize them here. First, it is teaming with U.S. tech leaders to help organizations create custom AI
applications and transform the world’s industries using the latest Nvidia NIM Agent Blueprints and Nvidia NeMo and Nvidia NIM microservices.
Across industries, organizations like AT&T, Lowe’s and the University of Florida are using the microservices to create their own data-driven AI flywheels to power custom generative AI applications.
U.S. technology consulting leaders Accenture, Deloitte, Quantiphi and SoftServe are adopting Nvidia NIM Agent Blueprints and Nvidia NeMo and NIM microservices to help clients in healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, financial services and retail create custom generative AI agents and copilots.
Data and AI platform leaders Cadence, Cloudera, DataStax, Google Cloud, NetApp, SAP, ServiceNow and Teradata are advancing their data and AI platforms with Nvidia NIM.
“AI is driving transformation and shaping the future of global industries,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, in a statement. “In collaboration with U.S. companies, universities and government agencies, Nvidia will help advance AI adoption to boost productivity and drive economic growth.”
New NeMo microservices — NeMo Customizer, NeMo Evaluator and NeMo Guardrails — can be paired with NIM microservices to help developers easily curate data at scale, customize and evaluate models, and manage responses to align with business objectives. Developers can then seamlessly deploy a custom NIM microservice across any GPU-accelerated cloud, data center or workstation.
Lowe’s, a home improvement company, is exploring the use of Nvidia NIM and NeMo microservices to improve experiences for associates and customers and enhance productivity of their store associates. For
example, the retailer is leveraging Nvidia NeMo Guardrails to enhance the safety and security of its generative AI solution platform.
SETI Institute researchers are also using Nvidia tech to conduct the first real-time AI search for fast radio bursts that might be a sign of life somewhere else. To better understand new and rare astronomical phenomena, radio astronomers are adopting accelerated computing and AI on Nvidia Holoscan and IGX platforms.
This summer, scientists supercharged their tools in the hunt for signs of life beyond Earth. Researchers at the SETI Institute became the first to apply AI to the real-time direct detection of faint radio signals from space. Their advances in radio astronomy are available for any field that applies accelerated computing and AI.
“We’re on the cusp of a fundamentally different way of analyzing streaming astronomical data, and the kinds of things we’ll be able to discover with it will be quite amazing,” said Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute, a group formed in 1984 that now includes more than 120 scientists.
The SETI Institute operates the Allen Telescope Array (pictured above) in Northern California. It’s a cutting-edge telescope used in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) as well as for the study of intriguing transient astronomical events such as fast radio bursts. The project started more than a decade ago, during early attempts to marry machine learning and astronomy.
Pittsburgh trades steel for AI tech
Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh will accelerate innovation and public-private collaboration through a pair of joint technology centers with Nvidia.
Serving as a bridge for academia, industry and public-sector groups to partner on artificial intelligence innovation, Nvidia is launching its inaugural AI Tech Community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Collaborations with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as startups, enterprises and organizations based in the “city of bridges,” are part of the new Nvidia AI Tech Community initiative, announced today during the Nvidia AI Summit in Washington, D.C.
The initiative aims to supercharge public-private partnerships across communities rich with potential for enabling technological transformation using AI. Two Nvidia joint technology centers will be established in Pittsburgh to tap into expertise in the region.
Nvidia’s Joint Center with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) for Robotics, Autonomy and AI will equip higher-education faculty, students and researchers with the latest technologies and boost innovation in the fields of AI and robotics. And Nvidia’s Joint Center with the University of Pittsburgh for AI and Intelligent Systems will focus on computational opportunities across the health sciences, including applications of AI in clinical medicine and biomanufacturing.
CMU — the nation’s No. 1 AI university according to the U.S. News & World Report — has pioneered work in autonomous vehicles and natural language processing. CMU’s Robotics Institute, the world’s largest university-affiliated robotics research group, brings a diverse group of more than a thousand faculty, staff, students, post-doctoral fellows and visitors together to solve humanity’s toughest challenges through robotics.
The University of Pittsburgh — designated as an R1 research university at the forefront of innovation — is ranked No. 6 among U.S. universities in research funding from the National Institutes of Health, topping more than $1 billion in research expenditures in fiscal year 2022 and ranking No. 14 among U.S. universities granted utility patents. Nvidia will provide the centers with DGX for AI training, Omniverse for simulation and Jetson for robotics edge computing.
U.S. healthcare system deploys AI agents for research to rounds
Nvidia also said the U.S. healthcare system is adopting digital health agents to harness AI across the board, from research laboratories to clinical settings.
The latest AI-accelerated tools — on display at the Nvidia AI Summit taking place this week in Washington, D.C. — include Nvidia NIM, a collection of cloud-native microservices that support AI model deployment and execution, and Nvidia NIM Agent Blueprints, a catalog of pretrained, customizable workflows.
These technologies are already in use in the public sector to advance the analysis of medical images, aid the search for new therapeutics and extract information from massive PDF databases containing text, tables and graphs.
For example, researchers at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are using several AI models built with Nvidia MonAI for medical imaging — including the Vista-3D NIM foundation model for segmenting and annotating 3D CT images. A team at NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) is using the NIM Agent Blueprint for generative AI-based virtual screening to reduce the time and cost of developing novel drug molecules.
With the Nvidia tech, medical researchers across the public sector can jump-start their adoption of state-of-the-art, optimized AI models to accelerate their work. The pretrained models are customizable based on an organization’s own data and can be continually refined based on user feedback.
Massive quantities of healthcare data — including research papers, radiology reports and patient records — are unstructured and locked in PDF documents, making it difficult for researchers to quickly search for information.
The Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center, also run by NCATS, is exploring using the PDF data extraction blueprint to develop generative AI tools that enhance the center’s ability to glean information from previously unsearchable databases. These tools will help answer questions from those affected by rare diseases.
Nvidia leaders, customers and partners are presenting over 50 sessions highlighting impactful work in the public sector.
Nvidia’s blueprint for cybersecurity
And Nvidia said Deloitte has adopted Nvidia NIM Agent Blueprint for container security to help enterprises build safe AI using open-source software.
AI is transforming cybersecurity with new generative AI tools and capabilities that were once the stuff of science fiction. And like many of the heroes in science fiction, they’re arriving just in time.
AI-enhanced cybersecurity can detect and respond to potential threats in real time — often before human analysts even become aware of them. It can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and anomalies that might indicate a breach. And AI agents can automate routine security tasks, freeing up human experts to focus on more complex challenges.
All of these capabilities start with software, so Nvidia has introduced an Nvidia NIM Agent Blueprint for container security that developers can adapt to meet their own application requirements.
The blueprint uses Nvidia NIM microservices, the Nvidia Morpheus cybersecurity AI framework, Nvidia cuVS and Nvidia Rapids accelerated data analytics to help accelerate analysis of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) at enterprise scale — from days to just seconds.
All of this is included in Nvidia AI Enterprise, a cloud-native software platform for developing and deploying secure, supported production AI applications.
Deloitte is among the first to use the Nvidia NIM Agent Blueprint for container security in its cybersecurity solutions, which supports agentic analysis of open-source software to help enterprises build secure AI. It can help enterprises enhance and simplify cybersecurity by improving efficiency and reducing the time needed to identify threats and potential adversarial activity.
Software containers incorporate large numbers of packages and releases, some of which may be subject to security vulnerabilities. Traditionally, security analysts would need to review each of these packages to understand potential security exploits across any software deployment. These manual processes are tedious, time-consuming and error-prone. They’re also difficult to automate effectively because of the complexity of aligning software packages, dependencies, configurations and the operating environment.
With generative AI, cybersecurity applications can rapidly digest and decipher information across a wide range of data sources, including natural language, to better understand the context in which potential vulnerabilities could be exploited.
Enterprises can then create cybersecurity AI agents that take action on this generative AI intelligence. The NIM Agent Blueprint for container security enables quick, automatic and actionable CVE risk analysis using large language models and retrieval-augmented generation for agentic AI applications. It helps developers and security teams protect software with AI to enhance accuracy, efficiency and streamline potential issues for human agents to investigate.
CUDA-X accelerates Polars data processing library for faster AI development for data scientists
Nvidia also said Polars, one of the fastest growing data analytics tools, has just crossed 9 million monthly downloads. As a modern DataFrame library, it is designed for efficiently processing datasets that fit on a single machine, without the overhead and complexity of distributed computing systems that are required for massive-scale workloads.
As enterprises grapple with complex data problems — ranging from detecting time-boxed patterns in credit card transactions to managing quickly shifting inventory needs across a global customer base — even higher performance is essential.
Polars and Nvidia engineers just released the Polars GPU engine powered by Rapids cuDF in open beta, bringing accelerated computing to the growing Polars community with zero code change required. This brings even more acceleration to the query execution for Polars — making this speedy data processing software up to 13x faster, compared to running on CPUs. It’s like giving rocket fuel to a cheetah to help it sprint even faster.
With data science and engineering teams building more and more data processing pipelines to fuel AI applications, it’s critical to choose the right software and infrastructure for the job to keep things running smoothly. For workloads well suited to individual servers, workstations and laptops, developers frequently use libraries like Polars to accelerate iterations, reduce complexity in development environments and lower infrastructure costs.
On these single machine-sized workloads, quick iteration time is often the top priority, as data scientists often need to do exploratory analysis to guide downstream model training or decision-making. Performance bottlenecks from CPU-only computing reduce productivity and can limit the number of test/train cycles that can be completed.
For large-scale data processing workloads too large for a single machine, organizations turn to frameworks like Apache Spark to help them distribute the work across nodes in the data center. At this scale, cost- and power-efficiency are often the top priorities, but costs can quickly balloon due to the inefficiencies of using traditional CPU-based computing infrastructure.
Nvidia’s CUDA-X data processing platform is designed with these needs in mind, optimized for cost- and energy-efficiency for large-scale workloads and performance for single-machine sized workloads.
[Updated: 8:33 a.m. on 10/8/24: Nvidia noted it has not been subpoenaed in an antitrust case in D.C.]
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Technology
Sandra Lin from KiwiCo talks why STEM toys are big business
Parents are always looking for ways that playtime can turn into a creative and educational opportunity. But for a lot of parents, engineering playful, educational projects just isn’t in the cards.
KiwiCo, co-founded by Sandra Lin, is a subscription company that provides STEM-based educational toys to help children learn during fun times. Lin joined the TechCrunch podcast Found to talk with Becca and Dom about the building of that company and how she’s managed to steadily grow it since it first launched more than a decade ago.
The company wants to “encourage kids to exercise their creativity, exercise their critical thinking skills, and hopefully see themselves as people who can envision something and make that a reality,” Lin told Found. “We’ve delivered over 50 million crates.”
Lin worked at PayPal and Procter and Gamble before launching KiwiCo. As a mother, she made sure her children had a hands-on playtime experience and would invite other moms and their kids to come too. “One of the moms was like, ‘You should start a business around this,” Lin recalled. “And my first thought was like, ‘Wow, this could be a really, really fun business to work on.”
Looking back, though it wasn’t clear that her previous tech experience would lend so well to the company she built, there were signs that fate would lead her here. “It kind of comes full circle, and I think it’s really fascinating to think about it that way because it’s definitely not what I had intended.”
The company went on to raise millions in venture dollars but has since turned to funding its own growth. “It’s not that we won’t raise money again at some point, we might,” Lin said. “I think we are lucky and that we can decide what that time actually is.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, she spoke about how she and her team go into designing educational toys, as well as how she balances her work life and her professional life. She also made a surprising announcement about a new product the company is launching which you can learn more about in this latest Found episode.
Science & Environment
American Water, largest U.S. water utility, hit by cyberattack
Picture Alliance | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
American Water, the largest water utility in the U.S., disclosed that it had been hit by a cyberattack.
The Camden, New Jersey-based company said in a security statement on its website that it had learned of “unauthorized activity in our computer networks and systems” last Thursday, which it determined “to be the result of a cybersecurity incident.”
The company said on Tuesday that it shut down its customer service portal, and as a result, its billing function “until further notice” and will not charge any late fees or other fees related to billing as long as the system is down.
Some recent hacks of major U.S. companies have brought key online systems to a halt and created chaos for consumers and businesses, such as the hack of UnitedHealth which led to nationwide difficulty among patients needs prescriptions filled and health-care professionals needing to be paid for services.
Hacks targeting U.S. water infrastructure, in particular, have been increasing, with some of the attacks linked to geopolitical rivals of the U.S., including Iran, Russia and China.
Taking out critical national infrastructure has become a top priority for foreign-linked cybercriminals. “All drinking water and wastewater systems are at risk — large and small, urban and rural,” an EPA spokesman recently told CNBC.
American Water provides drinking water and wastewater services to more than 14 million people with regulated operations in 14 states and on 18 military installations.
One recent Russian-linked hack in January of a water filtration plant in a small Texas town, Muleshoe was located near a U.S. Air Force base. “Water is among the least mature in terms of security,” Adam Isles, head of cybersecurity practice for Chertoff Group, recently told CNBC.
The FBI warned Congress in February that Chinese hackers had penetrated deeply into United States’ cyber infrastructure in an attempt to cause damage, targeting water treatment plans, the electrical grid, transportation systems and other critical infrastructure.
America Water said it remains early in the investigation and “currently believes” that no water or wastewater facilities or operations have been impacted and water remains safe to drink.
Law enforcement and third-party cybersecurity experts are now involved, the company said.
American Water did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment.
The rising cybercrime wave targeting key water infrastructure led the Environmental Protection Agency to issue an enforcement alert warning that 70% of water systems it inspected do not fully comply with requirements in the Safe Drinking Water Act. Without quantifying an exact number, the EPA said some have “alarming cybersecurity vulnerabilities” — default passwords that have not been updated, vulnerable single login setups and former employees who retained systems access.
American Water said it first learned of the unauthorized computer access on October 3, and was subsequently able to determine it was a cyberattack. It said turning off customer systems was intended to protect data, though it added that it is too soon to know whether any customer information is at risk.
Technology
Amazon Prime Day 2024: the best tech deals under $50
Once again, Amazon is holding a second Prime Day under the guise of Prime Big Deal Days, which runs through tomorrow, October 9th. While the naming convention might be terrible, the sale isn’t. In fact, many of our favorite gadgets and goods are receiving notable discounts right now, which we’ve highlighted in our larger roundup of the best Prime Day deals. However, if you’re looking to stick to a budget, here’s where you’ll find our top picks under $50.
We’ll be updating this post as Amazon’s latest Prime Day event rolls on, but, in the meantime, feel free to use the table to dig below to dig into your desired category.
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