NVIDIA is offering a new professional certification in generative AI to enable developers to establish technical credibility in this important domain. Generative AI is revolutionizing industries worldwide, yet there's a critical skills gap and need to uplevel employees to more fully harness the technology. Available for the first time from NVIDIA, this new professional certification enables developers, career professionals, and others to validate and showcase their generative AI skills and expertise. Our new professional certification program introduces two associate-level generative AI certifications, focusing on proficiency in large language models and multimodal workflow skills.

"Generative AI has moved to center stage as governments, industries and organizations everywhere look to harness its transformative capabilities," NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang recently said. The certification will become available starting at GTC, where in-person attendees can also access recommended training to prepare for a certification exam. "Organizations in every industry need to increase their expertise in this transformative technology," said Greg Estes, VP of developer programs at NVIDIA. "Our goals are to assist in upskilling workforces, sharpen the skills of qualified professionals, and enable individuals to demonstrate their proficiency in order to gain a competitive advantage in the job market."

The nonprofit organisation that is in charge of coordinating and managing the namespaces and numerical spaces on the internet—ICANN or Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number—has proposed a rather big change on how consumers and businesses could be accessing networked devices on their private networks in the future. ICANN has put forward a new top-level domain for private use, much like the 192.168.x.x IP address range is allocated to private networks (alongside two other ranges), we might end up with a similar top-level domain. The proposed domain will be .internal, although we already have .localhost and .local today, but neither is really usable in a private network.

As such .internal has been suggested—in favour of.private due to concerns about it sounding like something privacy related—as a means for less computer savvy users to connect to devices on a private network. We've already seen solutions from several router manufacturers that use various domain names or subdomains to enable easier connectivity to routers. However, the goal here is to avoid clashes with top-level domains on the internet and.internal is said to resolve this problem. That said, it's not clear how this will be implemented as yet, but the ICANN is set to release more details in the near future. Even though it might not be the perfect solution, it should hopefully allow people to remember what they called their devices when they need to access them, rather than trying to remember the correct IP address.

Microsoft today announced it was part of a global operation meant to disrupt the world's largest online criminal network. Dubbed Necurs, the network functioned as a botnet - a number of computers infected by malware or otherwise malicious software that are functioning on behalf of a botmaster. The botmaster is basically akin to an administrator - but for nefarious purposes.

Thought to be controlled by criminals based in Russia, Necurs spanned more than nine million computing devices across 35 countries, making it one of the largest spam email threat ecosystems known to authorities - besides being used for pump-and-dump stock scams, fake pharmaceutical spam email and "Russian dating" scams. Necurs was such a well-oiled machine that it was seen sending 3.8 million spam messages to over 40 million targets across a 58-day long time frame in the investigation.

Reports are coming in that Amazon registered three new domains on Tuesday. Normally, this wouldn't raise any eyebrows at all. However, the domain names are quite unique as they're related to cryptocurrency apparently. The domains are amazonethereum.com, amazoncryptocurrency.com, and amazoncryptocurrencies.com. According to the registration information taken from the Whois database, all three are registered to Amazon Technologies, Inc., which we all know is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc.

At the moment of this article, we're not sure what is the reasoning behind Amazon's move. Speculations are saying that maybe the tech giant is finally getting into the cryptocurrency business. Or perhaps it's simply a marketing strategy to protect the Amazon brand similar to when the company registered amazonbitcoin.com back in 2013, which redirects users to the Amazon front page. Some are considering it an indication that Amazon might start accepting cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin despite Amazon Pay's VP Patrick Gauthier telling CNBC last month that there were no immediate plans to accept cryptocurrency.

Last week, US authorities shut down a Canadian-run website that ends with the TLD (top-level domain) ".com", raising eyebrows. It appears that the US is staking claim to the ".com" TLD, letting the authorities seize any ".com" domain, even of websites that are not American. Internet infrastructure company EasyDNS, in its latest blog post, said "[the] ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc. needs to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of U.S. federal and state lawmakers."

This latest controversy highlights how "the U.S. continues to hold over key components of the global domain name system, and rips a Band-Aid off a historic sore point for other nations," Wired commented. It also strengthens the case for non-American businesses and internet companies to opt for local TLDs (eg: ".co.uk", ".de", ".in", etc.,). Naming yourself "Dotcom" isn't such a bright idea, either.

Almost everyone who understands something about technology will have heard of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (H.R.3261) currently being debated in the U.S. House. This is internet censorship legislation by any other name and anyone that doesn't have a vested interest in it like the big media cartels is against it. This is because it hands almost total control of the internet to powerful (read: money) special interest groups, allowing them to shut down websites at the mere whiff of an accusation of 'piracy', however small and however unfounded. This will easily ruin many legitimate businesses, all on the pretext of 'protecting copyright' from supposed 'financial losses' due to content 'theft'. It also does an awful lot of other things, all of them bad, which are fully detailed in the link above. Now, if anyone thinks that this is far-fetched, just look at how the current 'darling' of the internet, GoDaddy operates: they pulled the DNS records of weebly.com, because of one little complaint against the site and without even contacting the domain owner first to advise of the situation. Disgraceful. Give them SOPA and a webmaster doesn't stand a chance, regardless of their size.

The GoDaddy boycott over their support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation, which took effect today, appears to have worked. The initial fallout over GoDaddy's support for it, resulted in a furious backpedal and then a bit of dirty tricks to stop customers leaving. However, this backpedal stopped short of actually criticising it. The boycott, called by a user on Reddit and aided by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, appears to have focused GoDaddy's mind on what's right and what's wrong. They have finally given us that criticism of SOPA that they should have made in the first place, as CEO Warren Adelman, said in this statement:

We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to GoDaddy's prior support for SOPA, which was reversed. GoDaddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.