News

Google’s 3,900-Mile Grace Hopper Undersea Cable Lands In The UK

Undersea cables are the backbone of the internet, carrying around 98% of international traffic.

Published

3 years ago

September 17, 2021

Joanna Melki

google's 3900 mile grace hopper undersea cable lands in the uk

Google Cloud

Google has a good reason to celebrate this week because the tech giant has successfully completed its 3,900-mile undersea cable. The cable is named Grace Hopper, after the American computer scientist who was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and it connects New York (United States) to Bude (United Kingdom) and Bilbao (Spain).

Google

The Spanish branch was completed earlier in September as the first-ever Google-funded route to Spain. Now that the UK branch has landed as well, the mission, which was first announced last July, has reached its end.

“Grace Hopper represents a new generation of the trans-Atlantic cable coming to the UK shores and is one of the first new cables to connect the US and the UK since 2003,” says Google in the official announcement. “Grace Hopper will connect the UK to help meet the rapidly growing demand for high-bandwidth connectivity and services”.

The cable uses a cutting-edge multi-directional fiber switching architecture that lets Google better move traffic around outages and provide the reliability necessary to power critical Google services like Meet, Gmail, and Google Cloud.

The multi-directional fiber switching architecture will also help tightly integrate the upcoming Google Cloud region in Madrid into Google’s global infrastructure. The new region will leverage Telefonica’s Madrid region infrastructure to foster Spain’s digital transformation and advance 5G mobile edge computing.

Also Read: Carrefour City+ In Mall Of The Emirates Becomes Dubai’s First Contactless Store

Undersea cables like Grace Hopper are the backbone of the internet, carrying around 98% of international traffic. The first optical telecommunications cables were laid on the ocean floor back in the 1980s, and their number has since then grown to more than 400. The actual optical fibers that carry data between continents are only as thick as a single strand of human hair, but they’re protected by several layers of shielding and isolation.

News

Adobe Reveals New AI Tools That Will Wow Photoshop Novices

The company is forging ahead with its Firefly-based AI features, but some professionals have copyright concerns.

Published

11 hours ago

April 24, 2024

Nour Nasir

Adobe

On Tuesday, April 23, Adobe announced a beta version of Photoshop boasting several fresh features aimed at helping users generate new images and manipulate existing files through text prompts. The latest generative AI additions harness the power of Adobe’s new Firefly Image 3 model.

Among the highlights of the update is the Generate Image tool, designed to generate images based on textual cues, providing users who struggle with a blank canvas a starting point to work from. Additionally, Generative Fill, an existing tool for background completion or image expansion, now incorporates a Reference Image function. The enhancement enables users to guide the tool’s output towards a specific aesthetic or theme by uploading an image as a reference.

adobe photoshop ai update firefly image 3 model

The new AI tools significantly simplify the process of translating creative ideas into images and should be useful to both Photoshop novices and seasoned pros. Firefly Image 3 now has the ability to produce astonishingly realistic images, and its enhanced understanding of text prompts is now considered industry-leading.

Despite facing scrutiny over its training data and a backlash from certain segments of the creative community, Adobe remains committed to integrating generative AI features into its entire software suite. The company continues to assert that Firefly is a safe, ethical option for commercial use and positions it as an alternative to competitors like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion —both of which have faced allegations of using copyrighted material without proper attribution or compensation.

Also Read: Lebanese Newspaper Builds AI President To Beat Political Crisis

Despite Adobe’s confidence in Firefly’s abilities, recent findings have uncovered that its training dataset includes AI-generated images sourced from Midjourney and similar platforms, raising questions about the integrity of Adobe’s claims regarding the model’s commercial viability.

While Adobe maintains that its generative AI models are trained on licensed or public domain content from Adobe Stock, enthusiast Nick St. Pierre recently pointed out on X (formerly Twitter) that “over 13% of all images on Adobe Stock are AI-generated,” and that “most of the generated content comes from Dalle and Midjourney”.