Shameless Plug

VMware, AMD, Samsung and RISC-V Push For Confidential Computing Standards Published on July 01, 2023 at 04:10AM VMware has joined AMD, Samsung, and members of the RISC-V community to work on an open and cross-platform framework for the development and operation of applications using confidential computing hardware. The Register reports: Revealing the effort at the Confidential Computing Summit 2023 in San Francisco, the companies say they aim to bring about an industry transition to practical confidential computing by developing the open source Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing project. Among other goals, the project aims to standardize on a set of platform-independent developer APIs that can be used to develop or adapt application code to run in a confidential computing environment, with a Certifier Service overseeing them in operation. VMware claims to have researched, developed and open sourced the Certifier Framework, but with AMD on board, plus Samsung (which develo...

Schools Say US Teachers' Retirement Fund Was Breached By MOVEit Hackers Published on July 01, 2023 at 03:32AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Two U.S. schools have confirmed that TIAA, a nonprofit organization that provides financial services for individuals in academic fields, has been caught up in the mass-hacks targeting MOVEit file transfer tools. Middlebury College in Vermont and Trinity College in Connecticut both released security notices confirming they experienced data breaches as a result of a security incident at the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, or TIAA. According to its website, TIAA serves mire than five million active and retired employees participating at more than 15,000 institutions and manages $1.3 trillion in assets in more than 50 countries. Both of the security notices confirm that TIAA was affected by hackers' widespread exploitation of a flaw in MOVEit Transfer, an enterprise file transfer tool developed by...

Colorado, Connecticut Data Privacy Laws Go Into Effect July 1 Published on July 01, 2023 at 02:50AM Data privacy laws in Colorado and Connecticut will go into effect Saturday. From a report: If companies haven't finished their compliance work to abide by the rules, they could face civil penalties of up to $20,000 per violation in some states. Colorado and Connecticut add to an increasingly complex patchwork of state data privacy laws. California paved the way in 2018 after passing the country's first state-level privacy bill, while Virginia followed this year. The Colorado and Connecticut laws apply to entities that do business in those states, as well as businesses that process a certain amount of data about in-state customers. Under the new laws, residents of each state will have the right to request businesses delete their personal information, ask for a copy of the information businesses have collected about them, opt out of the sale of their personal data, and more. Both...

FTC Finally Proposes Ban on Fake Reviews Published on July 01, 2023 at 02:10AM The FTC has proposed a new rule banning numerous forms of fake reviews online, from outright fabricated ones to those that are sketchily repurposed or secretly manipulated. It may not totally rehabilitate the notoriously unreliable online review ecosystem, but it could help make things a bit more bearable. From a report: This rule has been a long time in the making, which is par for the course at any federal regulator. The FTC's first case of this type was in 2019, against a merchant that was making misleading claims and paying for fake reviews. Before that, it had taken on "influencer marketing" where a person didn't disclose that they were being paid to promote a product. Now the agency is ready to take comprehensive action with rules they first previewed last October and have now put in near-final form. The proposed rule is the result of much research and of consultation with businesse...

TSMC Says Some Of Its Data Was Swept Up in a Hack on a Hardware Supplier Published on July 01, 2023 at 01:30AM Chipmaker TSMC said on Friday that one of its hardware suppliers experienced a "security incident" that allowed the attackers to obtain configurations and settings for some of the servers the company uses in its corporate network. From a report: The disclosure came a day after the LockBit ransomware crime syndicate listed TSMC on its extortion site and threatened to publish the data unless it received a payment of $70 million. The hardware supplier, Kinmax Technology, confirmed that one of its test environments had been attacked by an external group, which was then able to retrieve configuration files and other parameter information. The company said it learned of the breach on Thursday and immediately shut down the compromised systems and notified the affected customer. "Since the above information has nothing to do with the actual application of the customer...

Top NIH Official Advised Covid Scientists That He Uses Personal Email To Evade FOIA Published on July 01, 2023 at 12:50AM A top adviser to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health admitted that he used a personal email account in an apparent effort to evade the strictures of the Freedom of Information Act, according to records obtained by congressional investigators probing the origin of Covid-19. The official also expressed his intention to delete emails in order to avoid media scrutiny. The Intercept: "As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA'd constantly," wrote David M. Morens, a high-ranking NIH official, in a September 2021 email, one of a series of email exchanges that included many leading scientists involved in the bitter Covid origins debate. "Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone," he added, "but not my NIH computer." After noting that his Gmail account had been hacked, however, he wrote to...

The Man Who Broke Bowling Published on July 01, 2023 at 12:10AM theodp writes: In The Man Who Broke Bowling, GQ's Eric Wills profiles professional bowler Jason Belmonte, whose two-handed bowling technique made him both an outcast as well as one of bowling's greatest, changing the sport forever. Unlike the rest of us, a 7-year-old Belmonte was unconvinced by the taunts used to prompt kids into switching from bowling two-handed to one-handed ("It was, Come on, you're a big boy now. It's time to bowl properly," Belmonte recalls). As a result, Belmonte was able to develop a 600-rpm throw when most pro bowlers averaged 350-400, imparting a spin that "sends the pins into concussion protocol." Wills writes: "When he first alighted on the professional bowling scene, Belmonte resembled an alien species: one that bowled with two hands. And not some granny shot, to be clear, but a kickass power move in which he uses two fingers (and no thumb) on his righ...

Valve Reportedly Banning Games Featuring AI Generated Content Published on June 30, 2023 at 03:40AM Valve has reportedly started banning Steam games featuring AI-created art assets, unless developers can prove they have rights to the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create them. From a report: In a Reddit post spotted by games industry veteran Simon Carless, a developer recounted submitting an early version of a game to Steam with a few "fairly obviously AI generated" assets which they said they planned to improve by hand in a later build. In response, they were told the game could not be approved unless the developer could prove to Valve that they owned all the necessary rights. "After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties," Valve said. "In particular, [Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on cop...

How Review-Bombing Can Tank a Book Before It's Published Published on June 30, 2023 at 03:00AM The website Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building readership, but the same features that help generate excitement can also backfire. The New York Times: Cecilia Rabess figured her debut novel, "Everything's Fine," would spark criticism: The story centers on a young Black woman working at Goldman Sachs who falls in love with a conservative white co-worker with bigoted views. But she didn't expect a backlash to strike six months before the book was published. In January, after a Goodreads user who had received an advanced copy posted a plot summary that went viral on Twitter, the review site was flooded with negative comments and one-star reviews, with many calling the book anti-Black and racist. Some of the comments were left by users who said they had never read the book, but objected to its premise. "It may look like a bunch of one-star reviews on...

Fed Says 57 Firms Set To Use 'FedNow' Instant Payments After Late July Launch Published on June 30, 2023 at 02:20AM The U.S. Federal Reserve announced on Thursday that 57 firms have been certified to utilize its "FedNow" instant payments system after it launches in late July. From a report: The Fed did not provide a specific date for the launch, but 41 banks and 15 service providers, including large firms like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of New York Mellon, US Bancorp and Wells Fargo, have completed formal testing and will be ready to provide instant payments after the new service is live. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Decades-long Bet on Consciousness Ends Published on June 30, 2023 at 01:35AM Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues. From a report: A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain's neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest -- and declared Chalmers the winner. What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference. "It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof," says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain...

Windows 11's AI-powered Copilot (and its Bing-powered ads) Enters Public Preview Published on June 30, 2023 at 01:03AM An anonymous reader shares a report: Last month, Microsoft announced that it would continue its put-ChatGPT-in-everything adventure with a new Windows 11 feature called Copilot. The company added generative AI to Edge and to the Bing-powered taskbar Search field months ago, but Copilot promises to be the most visible and hard-to-ignore version of Microsoft's big AI push in its most visible and hard-to-ignore product. This week's Windows Insider Preview build for Dev channel users, build 23493, will be the first to enable Copilot for public testers. After installing the update, preview users can press Windows + C to open a Copilot column on the right side of the screen. It will use the same Microsoft account you use for the rest of the OS (it's unclear whether it will work without a Microsoft account, though, to date, the preview has required sign-up a...

People Hire Phone Bots To Torture Telemarketers Published on June 30, 2023 at 12:10AM AI software and voice cloners simulate distracted saps willing to stay on the phone forever -- or until callers finally give up. From a report: Complaints about unwanted telephone calls are "far-and-away the largest category of consumer complaints to the FCC," with the average American receiving 14 unwanted calls a month, according to one industry estimate, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission said. Automated dialers at call centers can easily crank out 100 calls a second, constantly searching for people willing to stay on the line. Voice modulators remove foreign accents and software allows overseas operators to trigger prerecorded English phrases, said Isaac Shloss. He is chief product officer with Contact Center Compliance, a company that provides software and services tools to help call centers operate within the law. Roger Anderson, a 54-year-old in Monrovia, Calif., ...

Microsoft's GitHub Under Fire For DDoSing Crucial Open Source Project Website Published on June 29, 2023 at 04:20AM The servers used by the GMP project, an open source arithmetic library at the heart of GCC and other programs, slowed to a crawl earlier this month due to a large amount of network traffic originating from Microsoft servers. The Register reports: Torbjorn Granlund, principal author of GMP, raised the alarm in a note to the project's mailing list. "The GMP servers are under attack by several hundred IP addresses owned by Microsoft Corporation," he wrote. "We do not know if this is made with malice by Microsoft, if it is some sort of mistake, or if [it is one] of their cloud customers ... running the attack. The attack targets the GMP repo, with thousands of identical requests. The requests are cleverly chosen as to cause heavy system load. "We're firewalling off all of Microsoft's IP addresses as an emergency response." The follow...

Australia Urged To Ban Online Gambling Ads To Curb Growing Addiction Published on June 29, 2023 at 03:40AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Australia should phase out advertising for online gambling in three years, a parliamentary committee of inquiry recommended on Wednesday as it looked to limit the "havoc" it caused in one of the world's biggest betting market. The committee made 31 recommendations on how online gambling, which it said was changing the culture of sport, should be regulated and how Australians struggling with addiction should be supported. Australians outspend the citizens of every other country on online gambling, Peta Murphy, chair of the committee said in the report titled "You win some, you lose more." "This is wreaking havoc in our communities," Murphy said. Murphy said online gambling companies advertise deliberately and strategically alongside sport, which has normalized it as fun and harmless and sociable a...

ChatGPT App Can Now Search the Web Via Bing Published on June 29, 2023 at 03:00AM If you're a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you can now use a new feature on the ChatGPT app called Browsing to have ChatGPT search Bing for answers to questions. TechCrunch reports: Browsing can be enabled by heading to the New Features section of the app settings, selecting "GPT-4" in the model switcher and choosing "Browse with Bing" from the drop-down list. Browsing is available on both the iOS and Android ChatGPT apps. OpenAI says that Browsing is particularly useful for queries relating to current events and other information that "extend[s] beyond [ChatGPT's] original training data." When Browsing is disabled, ChatGPT's knowledge cuts off in 2021. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WhatsApp Kills Off the Electron-Based Desktop App Published on June 29, 2023 at 02:20AM WhatsApp has announced it is retiring its Electron-based desktop app, forcing users to switch to the native app for their OS to continue using WhatsApp. Android Police reports: Back when WhatsApp was in the early stages of development, the developers created an app for desktop, based on the Electron JavaScript framework. This allowed them to share a code base between WhatsApp Web and the new, platform-agnostic desktop app that worked on both Windows and macOS. Around four weeks ago, a countdown timer showed up on the main screen of this desktop app, announcing its shutdown. Doomsday is now here and WABetaInfo reports anyone visiting the Electron-based app just sees a screen saying "App expired." The deprecated app helpfully links to the native WhatsApp Desktop app available on the Microsoft Store or the Mac App Store. The new native app has been stable for around a year now, but is still...

2,200 Forgotten Vintage Computers Are Being Liberated From a Barn In Massachusetts Published on June 29, 2023 at 01:43AM A collection of over 2,200 new old stock computers from the 1980s, manufactured by a company called NABU and featuring a groundbreaking pre-internet network, are being liberated from a barn in Massachusetts. "In a way, this is two stories: The first, of a breakthrough network from Canada, a consumer-friendly 1983 version of the internet decades ahead of its time," writes Ernie Smith via Motherboard. "The other story, of the man who got a hold of these machines, held onto them for 33 years, and mysteriously allowed them to flood the used market one day. One day, thanks to a confluence of the right people noticing the right eBay listings, these two stories merged and created a third story -- the tale of a computer network, brought back to life." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: For more than two decades, the biggest ...

Minecraft's Devs Exit its 7 Million-Strong Subreddit After Reddit's Ham-Fisted Crackdown on Protest Published on June 29, 2023 at 12:19AM An anonymous reader shares a report: If you want official updates from the Minecraft dev team, you better not look on Reddit. A post from a Reddit user bearing the name sliced_lime and a flair indicating they are the Minecraft Java Tech Lead (almost certainly Mojang's Mikael Hedberg) announced yesterday that Mojang would no longer be posting official content to Reddit, in the wake of that platform's response to protests over changes to its API. "As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to rule and moderation changes across many subreddits," read the post, before announcing that those changes have led Mojang to "no longer feel that Reddit is an appropriate place to post official content or refer [its] players to". The events are only obliquely referred to in th...

SiriusXM To Shut Down Stitcher Podcast App Published on June 28, 2023 at 04:40AM SiriusXM will shut down its podcast app Stitcher at the end of August. The Hollywood Reporter reports: In a memo sent to employees, executives from the satellite radio and audio company said SiriusXM will not be backing away from podcasting, but rather will be trying to move more listeners over to its SXM app in order to grow subscriber numbers ahead of new "streaming experience" launching this fall. The SiriusXM Podcast Network, which includes content production hubs Stitcher Studios and Earwolf, remains unchanged as part of this decision and there will not be layoffs as part of this. "The scale and reach of our widely distributed podcasts has been and remains a crucial accelerant for our advertising sales business, while incorporating podcasts more holistically into our flagship SiriusXM subscription service will help to drive further growth. As a result, we have made the decision to sun...

Figma's Design Tools Are Now Free On Chromebooks For All US School Students Published on June 28, 2023 at 04:00AM Figma is expanding its partnership with Google for Education in a bid to introduce more school-age students to its product design and collaboration platforms. Announced during the Config event on Wednesday, June 21st, all K-12 students across the US can now access Figma for free on education Chromebooks. Figma is also expanding its educational partnership with Chromebooks outside of the US, starting with Google schools in Japan. The Verge reports: Today's announcement effectively opens up the beta program that Figma released last year, which was initially limited to select US high schools. As with the beta, students will have access to both Figma (the company's flagship product design platform) and FigJam, Figma's collaborative whiteboarding app. Figma's Google program is only available on Chromebooks, though the company said that schools using non-Goo...

Cleaner Accidentally Ruins Decades of US College's Research By Turning Off Freezer Published on June 28, 2023 at 03:20AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A cleaner at a college in New York state accidentally destroyed decades of research by turning off a freezer in order to mute "annoying alarm" sounds. The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, is suing the cleaner's employer, alleging improper training. According to a lawsuit filed in the New York supreme court in Rensselaer county earlier this month, the university is seeking more than $1m in damages, the Times Union newspaper reported. "People's behavior and negligence caused all this," Michael Ginsberg, an attorney for RPI, told the Times Union. "Unfortunately, they wiped out 25 years of research." The cleaner, who is not named in the lawsuit, was employed by Daigle Cleaning Systems and worked at RPI for several months in 2020, when the incident occurred. ...

Red Hat Tries To Address Criticism Over Their Source Repository Changes Published on June 28, 2023 at 02:40AM gatzke writes: Upsetting many in the open-source community was Red Hat's announcement last week that they would begin limiting access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources by putting them behind the Red Hat Customer Portal and publicly would be limited to the CentOS Stream sources. In turn this causes problems for free-of-cost derivatives like AlmaLinux moving forward. Red Hat this week issued another blog post trying to address some of the criticism. Red Hat's blog this week featured a post by Mike McGrath, the VP of Core Platforms Engineering at Red Hat. In the post he talks up "Red Hat's commitment to open source." Some of the key takeaways include: "Despite what's currently being said about Red Hat, we make our hard work readily accessible to non-customers. Red Hat uses and will always use an open source development model. When we find a b...

Decentralized Social Networking App Damus To Be Removed From App Store Published on June 28, 2023 at 02:02AM Damus, a decentralized social networking app backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, will be removed from the App Store due to Apple's strict payment rules. From a report: Apple had threatened to remove Damus earlier this month over the app's tips feature, claiming that it could be used by content creators to sell digital content on the platform. The tech giant has a long history of prohibiting developers from selling additional in-app content unless the transactions go through Apple, which takes a 30% cut. To avoid a ban, the team behind Damus had to tweak the app's tipping feature, which is made possible by way of Bitcoin's Lightning Network. The company previously explained in a tweet that it had to remove the tips button from posts and was only allowed to permit tips on profiles. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Supreme Court Guts Protections for Cyberstalking Victims Published on June 28, 2023 at 01:06AM The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that in order to find someone guilty of making a "true threat" courts must first determine that the person recklessly disregarded the fact that their words might be perceived as threats. From a report: Experts fear the decision will create new hurdles for victims of cyberstalking by requiring them to first prove that their stalkers understand the consequences of their actions. "The Supreme Court has just decreed that stalking is free speech protected by the First Amendment if the stalker genuinely believes his actions are non-threatening," tweeted Mary Anne Franks, a professor at George Washington Law School and president of the nonprofit Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. "That is, the more deluded the stalker, the more protected the stalking." The case, Counterman v. Colorado, concerns a man named Billy Raymond Counterman, who was ...