Kaspersky Lab to Shut Down US Operations Following Government Ban
- Written by Shipra Sanganeria Cybersecurity & Tech Writer
- Fact-Checked by Justyn Newman Former Lead Cybersecurity Editor
Cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab will shut down all its US operations and lay off its US-based employees following the recent government ban on the sale and distribution of its products.
The announcement comes shortly after Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo stated in June 2024 that Moscow’s influence over Kaspersky posed a significant risk to US infrastructure and services.
Kaspersky, which has operated in the US for two decades, initially denied the allegations and planned to challenge the ban in court. However, Kaspersky has now decided to exit the US market.
The popular antivirus provider in a statement to Zero Day confirmed that beginning July 20, it will “gradually wind down” its US operations, as “business opportunities in the country [was] no longer viable.”
According to Techcrunch , Kaspersky’s US website has already ceased selling its products. A message on the site reads, “For legal compliance purposes, Kaspersky products cannot be purchased from your country.”
The US Commerce Department in June 2024 imposed a ban prohibiting the sale of all Kaspersky antivirus and software products to US consumers. This ban includes software or security updates for current licenses. Effective from September 29, 2024, the prohibition extends to the resale of these products and the integration of Kaspersky’s antivirus and security software into other products or services.
In addition to the ban, the US Commerce Department has added three Kaspersky subsidiaries to the US Entity List (trade-restrictions entities list). Moreover, the US Treasury Department sanctioned 12 senior Kaspersky executives after the Commerce Department announcement.
By imposing these sanctions, the current administration aims to prevent US-based suppliers and consumers from conducting business with Kaspersky and the 12 associated executives. Additionally, Commerce Secretary Raimondo (as reported by Zero Day) explained that the gradual ban rollout is intended to allow US consumers enough time to shift to alternative security products.
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
Former OpenAI And Tesla Engineer Launches New AI Education Startup
- Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
- Fact-Checked by Justyn Newman Former Lead Cybersecurity Editor
Computer engineer scientist Andrej Karpathy—former researcher at OpenAI and head of AI at Tesla—launched a new company, Eureka Labs, an AI-native educational platform.
Karpathy announced it on X this Tuesday and explained that Eureka Labs will be a new educational approach built with AI. In its new AI-powered platform, teachers will design their courses and AI teaching assistants will help students navigate the content, enhancing the learning experience in massive open online courses.
According to Reuters , Karpathy was one of the founding members of OpenAI, back in 2015, and was later hired by Tesla as director of AI and autopilot vision to help build driver assistance software. The computer engineer received a PhD from Stanford University and has been working on educational content of his own like teaching how to solve Rubik’s cube, and more on his YouTube channel .
“While my work in AI took me from academic research at Stanford to real-world products at Tesla and AGI research at OpenAI,” Karpathy explained in his post, “All of my work combining the two so far has only been part-time, as side quests to my “real job”, so I am quite excited to dive in and build something great, professionally and full-time.”
Karpathy shared his enthusiasm and described Eureka Labs as a project that combines two decades of this work and passion for AI and education.
The first product on the new platform will be “LLM101n”, an undergraduate-level class that will help students train their own AI models. The course products will be available online but Karpathy explained that they also hope to gather virtual and in-person groups to go through the program together.
The course description, available on GitHub, states: “We are going to build everything end-to-end from basics to a functioning web app similar to ChatGPT, from scratch in Python, C, and CUDA, and with minimal computer science prerequisites. By the end, you should have a relatively deep understanding of AI, LLMs, and deep learning more generally.”
