Shameless Plug

Walmart Closes $2.3 Billion Acquisition of Vizio Published on December 04, 2024 at 04:59AM Walmart said Tuesday it had completed its $2.3 billion all-cash acquisition of TV maker Vizio, a move by the retailing giant to expand its advertising business. From a report: The closing of the deal follows the expiration of the waiting period under federal regulations. Walmart announced the deal to buy Vizio in February 2024. Walmart said the acquisition of Vizio will let it "bring to market new and differentiated ways for advertisers to meaningfully connect with customers at scale and boost product discovery" through Walmart Connect, the company's U.S. retail media business. Walmart and Vizio will continue to operate separately "for the foreseeable future," according to the announcement. William Wang will continue to lead Vizio as CEO, reporting to Seth Dallaire, executive VP and chief growth officer of Walmart U.S. Vizio, founded in 2002, is a leading vendor of value...

Telcos Struggle To Boot Chinese Hackers From Networks Published on December 04, 2024 at 03:30AM China-linked spies are still lurking inside U.S. telecommunications networks roughly six months after American officials started investigating the intrusions, senior officials told reporters Tuesday. From a report: This is the first time U.S. officials have confirmed reports that Salt Typhoon hackers still have access to critical infrastructure -- and they're proving difficult to kick out. Officials added that they don't yet know the full scope of the intrusions, despite starting the investigation in late spring. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and FBI released guidance Tuesday for the communications sector to harden their networks against Chinese state-sponsored hackers. The guide includes basic steps like maintaining logs of activity on the network, keeping an inventory of all devices in the telecom's environment and changing any default equipment passwor...

The Number of Americans Wanting To Switch Jobs Hits a 10-Year High Published on December 04, 2024 at 01:00AM More Americans are looking to switch jobs than at any point in the past decade. In a cooling job market, that's a lot easier said than done.ÂFrom a report: White-collar hiring continues to slow, but workers' restlessness to find new work is intensifying, new Gallup data show. More than half of 20,000 U.S. workers surveyed in November said they were watching for or actively seeking a new job. That's the largest share since 2015, eclipsing the so-called Great Resignation of 2021 and 2022, when millions of people quit jobs for better ones. The result? Job satisfaction has fallen to its lowest level in recent years as employees feel more stuck -- and frustrated -- where they are, according to Gallup, whose quarterly surveys are widely viewed as a bellwether of workplace sentiment. Smaller raises and fewer promotions are spurring some of the discontent, workers say. So ...

Amazon AI Data Centers To Double as Carbon Capture Machines Published on December 04, 2024 at 12:01AM Amazon's data centers could soon double as carbon capture machines, offsetting the harmful effects of the massive amounts of energy required to run them. From a report: Amazon Web Services is partnering with startup Orbital Materials, which used artificial intelligence to create a new material specifically designed for separating carbon from hot air exhaust in data centers, the companies announced Monday. Orbital Materials CEO Jonathan Godwin said he expects AWS to capture enough carbon to exceed the fossil fuel consumption used to power its AI data centers, giving them a net negative impact on climate change. The process will cost less than purchasing captured carbon to offset its climate impact, according to Godwin. The system, part of a pilot program at a to-be-determined data center location, works when outside air is sucked in and used to cool extremely hot semiconductors de...

Nike-owned NFT Wearables Startup RTFKT is Winding Down Published on December 03, 2024 at 05:01AM RTFKT, the NFT project most known for its attempt at making "digital shoes" a thing, is shutting down, according to a statement on Monday. From a report: The project, acquired by athletic wear juggernaut Nike in 2021 for an undisclosed sum, plans to fully unwind by the end of January, though its Ethereum-based tokens will remain accessible. Launched in 2020 amid the beginnings of the mania around NFTs and the metaverse, RTFKT quickly garnered a reputation as a fast-moving startup. It spun up "drops" with brands, including Nike, and collaborated with the likes of sneaker designer Jeff Staple and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Company Claims 1,000% Price Hike Drove It From VMware To Open Source Rival Published on December 03, 2024 at 02:31AM An anonymous reader shares a report: Companies have been discussing migrating off of VMware since Broadcom's takeover a year ago led to higher costs and other controversial changes. Now we have an inside look at one of the larger customers that recently made the move. According to a report from The Register today, Beeks Group, a cloud operator headquartered in the United Kingdom, has moved most of its 20,000-plus virtual machines (VMs) off VMware and to OpenNebula, an open source cloud and edge computing platform. Beeks Group sells virtual private servers and bare metal servers to financial service providers. It still has some VMware VMs, but "the majority" of its machines are currently on OpenNebula, The Register reported. Beeks' head of production management, Matthew Cretney, said that one of the reasons for Beeks migration was a VMware bill for ...

The Casual Moviegoer is a Thing of the Past Published on December 03, 2024 at 01:35AM U.S. movie theaters are struggling to attract casual moviegoers, who once made up a significant portion of box office revenues, as shorter theatrical runs and changing consumer habits reshape the industry. The domestic box office, which regularly exceeded $10 billion in annual ticket sales before COVID-19, is expected to reach only $8.5 billion this year. Films now average 32 days in theaters compared to 80 days pre-pandemic, limiting opportunities for audiences to discover movies spontaneously. Midtier films generating $50-100 million at the box office have become scarcer, particularly in genres like drama and romantic comedy. Theater chains are responding with enhanced experiences and loyalty programs to draw audiences back. "It's fair to say there is a missing billion dollars that, if we had the right movies, people would be going to see them," said Bruce Nash, founder of movie busi...

Getty Images CEO Says Content-Scraping AI Groups Use 'Pure Theft' For Profit Published on December 03, 2024 at 12:40AM Getty Images CEO has criticized AI companies' stance on copyright, particularly pushing back against claims that all web content is fair use for AI training. The statement comes amid Getty's ongoing litigation against Stability AI for allegedly using millions of Getty-owned images without permission to train its Stable Diffusion model, launched in August 2022. Acknowledging AI's potential benefits in areas like healthcare and climate change, Getty's chief executive argued against the industry's "all-or-nothing" approach to copyright. He specifically challenged Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's assertion that web content has been "freeware" since the 1990s. The Getty chief advocated for applying fair use principles case-by-case, distinguishing between AI models for scientific advancement and commercial content gene...

UN Plastic Treaty Talks Collapse Without a Deal Published on December 02, 2024 at 03:59AM United Nations members gathered this week in Busan, South Korea to negotiate the first treaty reducing plastic pollution. But Politico reports that "talks collapsed late Sunday after negotiators failed to resolve their differences and agree on a global plastic treaty. At the heart of the disagreement was a refusal by oil-rich nations led by Saudi Arabia to accept a deal that put limits on plastic production... Throughout the two years of talks, oil-rich and plastic-producing states had repeatedly clashed with nations that wanted to reduce plastic production to solve a worsening plastic pollution crisis. Many went to Busan hopeful differences would be put aside in the name of combatting a common global threat. But in the end this proved too optimistic... The EU, alongside more than 100 other countries that included the U.K., on Thursday had backed a new proposal spearheaded by Panama pushing...

Bluesky Passes Threads for Active Website Users, But Confronts 'Scammers and Impersonators' Published on December 02, 2024 at 02:28AM Bluesky now has more active website users than Threads in the U.S., according to a graph from the Financial Times. And though Threads still leads in app usage, "Prior to November 5 Threads had five times more daily active users in the U.S. than Bluesky... Now, Threads is only 1.5 times larger than its rival, Similarweb said." But "the influx of new users has opened up new opportunities for scammers and impersonators," Engadget reported this week: A recent analysis by Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech found that 44 percent of the top 100 most-followed accounts on Bluesky had at least one "doppelganger," with most looking like "cheap knock-offs of the bigger account, down to the same bio and profile picture," Mantzarlis wrote in his newsletter Faked Up....

Greg Kroah-Hartman Sees 'Tipping Point' for Rust Drivers in Linux Kernel Published on December 02, 2024 at 01:04AM Greg Kroah-Hartman noted some coming changes in Linux 6.13 will make it possible to create "way more" Rust-based kernel drivers. "The veteran kernel developer believes we're at a tipping point of seeing more upstream Rust drivers ahead," reports Phoronix: These Rust char/misc changes are on top of the main Rust pull for Linux 6.13 that brought 3k lines of code for providing more Rust infrastructure. Linux 6.13 separately is also bringing Rust file abstractions. "Sorry for doing this at the end of the merge window," Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote in the pull request, explaining that "conference and holiday travel got in the way on my side (hence the 5am pull request emails...)" Loads of things in here... — Rust misc driver bindings and other rust changes to make misc drivers actually possible. I think this is the tipping point...

CJIT - C, Just In Time! Published on December 02, 2024 at 12:04AM Long-time Slashdot reader jaromil writes: As a fun project, we hacked together a C interpreter (based on Tiny C Compiler) that compiles C code in-memory and runs it live. CJIT today is a 2MB executable that can do a lot, including call functions from any installed library on Linux, Windows, and MacOSX. Slashdot reader oliwer points out "they are also including a REPL, which could be interesting." And the CJIT web page promises there's "no EULA to sign, no IDE to install... 100% Free and open source!" It also says the project was inspired by Terry Davis (TempleOS) and Fabrice Bellard (Tiny C Compiler). Read more of this story at Slashdot.