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Should companies be on the hook for criminal employees' doings?

Brit supermarket chain WM Morrisons is headed for the Supreme Court to fight an earlier ruling that made it liable for one disgruntled employee dumping the personal details of 100,000 colleagues online.…

Trailrunner7 shares a report: The discovery of a new, sophisticated team of hackers spying on dozens of government targets is never good news. But one team of cyberspies has pulled off that scale of espionage with a rare and troubling trick, exploiting a weak link in the internet's cybersecurity that experts have warned about for years: DNS hijacking, a technique that meddles with the fundamental address book of the internet. Researchers at Cisco's Talos security division on Wednesday revealed that a hacker group it's calling Sea Turtle carried out a broad campaign of espionage via DNS hijacking, hitting 40 different organizations. In the process, they went so far as to compromise multiple country-code top-level domains -- the suffixes like .co.uk, or .ru, that end a foreign web address -- putting all the traffic of every domain in multiple countries at risk. The hackers' victims include telecoms, internet service providers, and domain registrars responsible for implementing the domain name system. But the majority of the victims and the ultimate targets, Cisco believes, were a collection of mostly governmental organizations including ministries of foreign affairs, intelligence agencies, military targets, and energy-related groups, all based in the Middle East and North Africa. By corrupting the internet's directory system, hackers were able to silently use "man-in-the-middle" attacks to intercept all internet data from email to web traffic sent to those victim organizations. [...] Cisco Talos said it couldn't determine the nationality of the Sea Turtle hackers, and declined to name the specific targets of their spying operations. But it did provide a list of the countries where victims were located: Albania, Armenia, Cypress, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Cisco's Craig Williams confirmed that Armenia's .am top-level domain was one 'of the "handful" that were compromised, but wouldn't say which of the other countries' top-level domains were similarly hijacked.

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The Surface Hub, Microsoft's digital whiteboard designed for conferences and meetings, received a hardware refresh today. From a report: At a press event at Steelcase's swanky New York City hub, the Redmond, Washington company detailed the improved Surface Hub 2S, which boasts a touchscreen that's higher in resolution than the original, plus a 4K front camera that supports video calling, an enhanced 8-microphone far-field microphone array, and other improvements. Surface 2S will ship in June, starting at $8,999 and going up to nearly $12,000. (That's the same base price as the original Surface Hub 2.) A larger version -- the Surface Hub 2S 85-inch -- will also be available at an as-yet-unrevealed price, and stands and wall mounts from Steelcase will be sold separately for $1,449.99 and $249, respectively.

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The Surface Hub, Microsoft's digital whiteboard designed for conferences and meetings, received a hardware refresh today. From a report: At a press event at Steelcase's swanky New York City hub, the Redmond, Washington company detailed the improved Surface Hub 2S, which boasts a touchscreen that's higher in resolution than the original, plus a 4K front camera that supports video calling, an enhanced 8-microphone far-field microphone array, and other improvements. Surface 2S will ship in June, starting at $8,999 and going up to nearly $12,000. (That's the same base price as the original Surface Hub 2.) A larger version -- the Surface Hub 2S 85-inch -- will also be available at an as-yet-unrevealed price, and stands and wall mounts from Steelcase will be sold separately for $1,449.99 and $249, respectively.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sure, FPGAs don't make much cash, but they might soon?

Intel is buying Omnitek, a small British FPGA design house primarily serving the media and broadcast industries.…

The UK's age verification system for online pornography will become mandatory on 15 July, the government has confirmed. From a report: From that date, commercial providers of online pornography will be required to carry out "robust" age verification checks on users, in order to keep children from accessing adult content. Websites that refuse to implement the checks face being blocked by UK internet service providers or having their access to payment services withdrawn.The digital minister, Margot James, welcomed the introduction of the rules, saying: "Adult content is currently far too easy for children to access online." She added, "The introduction of mandatory age verification is a world first, and we've taken the time to balance privacy concerns with the need to protect children from inappropriate content. We want the UK to be the safest place in the world to be online, and these new laws will help us achieve this." Will Gardner, the chief executive of Childnet, said: "We hope that the introduction of this age verification will help in protecting children, making it harder for young people to accidentally come across online pornography, as well as bringing in the same protections that we use offline to protect children from age-restricted goods or services."

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That Storwize array refresh was really needed

Analysis IBM has posted a third sequential quarter of storage hardware revenue decline as part of its first 2019 quarter's results.…

Microsoft has lost control over a crucial subdomain that Windows 8 and Windows 10 use to deliver RSS-based news and updates to Live Tiles -- animated Windows start menu items. From a report: The subdomain (notifications.buildmypinnedsite.com) is currently under the control of Hanno Bock, a security researcher and journalist for German tech news site Golem.de. The subdomain was part of the buildmypinnedsite.com service that Microsoft set up with the launch of Windows 8, and more specifically to allow websites to show live updates inside users' Start pages and menus. [...] Today Bock said the service no longer works. "The host that should deliver the XML files -- notifications.buildmypinnedsite.com -- only showed an error message from Microsoft's cloud service Azure," the researcher said. "The host was redirected to a subdomain of Azure. However this subdomain wasn't registered with Azure." Bock registered this subdomain on his Azure account and is currently sinkholing any requests it receives. He also notified Microsoft of the issue but said the company did not reply. "We won't keep the host registered permanently. There's a decent amount of traffic reaching this host and running up costs," the researcher said. "Once we cancel the subdomain a bad actor could register it and abuse it for malicious attacks," he warned.

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Virgin complaint upheld

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has slammed Brit telco Vodafone's ads for its "Gigafast Broadband" as misleading.…

Skip it, it's a Google thing

Linux-loving hyperscale types at Euro startup Quobyte have pushed out a plug-in for its Data Centre File System, used in HPC-style workloads, that enables TensorFlow apps to access its files directly instead of having to traipse through the Linux kernel.…

The in-flight moving map, object of fascination for travel geeks and impatient fliers, is going in a new direction. But have your credit card ready: The beloved map will become one more revenue-generator for airlines [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled.], reports the Wall Street Journal. From the story: Maps are the most popular elements of in-flight entertainment systems, capturing passenger attention by posting live updates about a trip, most importantly when you'll arrive. Airlines offer movies, TV shows, podcasts and games on entertainment systems, but the boring map, which made its debut over 30 years ago, turns out to be the most useful, maybe even anxiety-reducing, focus of bored passengers. The map gives you a sense of control, showing not only exactly where you are, but altitude, airspeed, time zone, temperature, distance traveled and miles left to go. For some, there's a sense of adventure built in: You may never visit the Faeroe Islands, but you feel like you've been there when your flight draws a line over them. Now manufacturers are giving maps a makeover. You'll be able to get encyclopedic details on Mount Fuji as you fly past, track your spouse's flight from your seat and zoom in for details on points of interest like the top 10 rides at Disneyland compiled from social media. The map will be loaded with data about your flight, down to which languages flight attendants onboard speak, when dinner will be served and how long you'll be in Brazilian airspace. And guess what? Airlines will be using the maps to sell you things like tickets to those popular amusement park rides. Hotels, theme parks, restaurants or other attractions may be throwing advertising onto your route. Shopping malls and stores, too. After all, they know where you're going.

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You have three months left of unfettered self-love to enjoy

Stick 15 July in your diary because the government has at last broken its silence over when the UK's age checks for online porn will come into force – thrusting legions of onanists a timeline for either their last hurrahs or how they intend to circumvent the system.…

Deadline for 5G kit was perilously close

Comment The dramatic peace treaty between Apple and Qualcomm is good news for iPhone buyers, but raises questions about the market's ability to produce a viable competitor to the 5G leader – at least in the short term.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: T-Mobile U.S. and Sprint are facing potential rejection of their proposed merger at the U.S. Department of Justice. DOJ staffers "have told T-Mobile US and Sprint that their planned merger is unlikely to be approved as currently structured," The Wall Street Journal reported today, citing people familiar with the matter. "In a meeting earlier this month, Justice Department staff members laid out their concerns with the all-stock deal and questioned the companies' arguments that the combination would produce important efficiencies for the merged firm," the Journal wrote. DOJ staffers' recommendations aren't the final word at the agency. The department's antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim, would decide whether to challenge or allow the merger. The Justice Department's antitrust division is reviewing the merger and could file a lawsuit in federal court in an attempt to block the deal. Success isn't guaranteed, a fact the DOJ was reminded of when a U.S. District Court judge allowed AT&T to buy Time Warner despite DOJ opposition. The DOJ could also approve the merger with conditions, but that would require agreement with T-Mobile and Sprint on what those conditions would be. "T-Mobile and Sprint could offer concessions, such as assets sales, to address the government's concerns," the Journal wrote. Sprint shares "are trading at a roughly 20 percent discount to the price implied by the all-stock deal, signaling Wall Street doubts about the combination's chances," the report also said. T-Mobile CEO John Legere denied the report in a tweet, saying that "[t]he premise of this story... is simply untrue. Out of respect for the process, we have no further comment." Sprint Executive Chairman Marcelo Claure also claimed that the "article is not accurate," adding that Sprint "continue[s] to have discussions with regulators about our proposed merger."

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Can't take over the galaxy if you don't know how it works, innit?

American researchers are working to introduce the laws of physics into machine learning models to improve the way algorithms understand the real world.…

Wednesday off every week? OK, you have our attention

Wednesday, colloquially known as "hump day", tends to be regarded as the toughest of the working week. Furthest from the weekend in either direction, distracted eyes flit constantly clockwards in anticipation of medicinal refreshment or simply just leaving a bureaucratic hellhole.…

I was slapped in Nebraska, sunshine, not California

Special report In the internet era where people are able to interact across wide geographic areas, the world's legal systems have struggled with the question of where an offence occurred and so where a lawsuit or criminal charges should be lodged.…

Dead telescope keeps on giving

Binary star systems are relatively rare but astroboffins poring through data from the now-defunct Kepler telescope have found something unique - a binary system with three planets.…

At a TED conference, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the social media company needs to rethink how they incentivize user behavior to combat abuse and misinformation. "He suggested that the service works best as an 'interest-based network,' where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it -- rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts, and then grow their follower numbers in turn," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Dorsey recalled that when the team was first building the service, it decided to make follower count "big and bold," which naturally made people focus on it. "Was that the right decision at the time? Probably not," he said. "If I had to start the service again, I would not emphasize the follower count as much ... I don't think I would create 'likes' in the first place." Since he isn't starting from scratch, Dorsey suggested that he's trying to find ways to redesign Twitter to shift the "bias" away from accounts and toward interests. And while Dorsey said he's less interested in maximizing time spent on Twitter and more in maximizing "what people take away from it and what they want to learn from it," TED's Chris Anderson suggested that Twitter may struggle with that goal since it's a public company, with a business model based on advertising. Would Dorsey really be willing to see time spent on the service decrease, even if that means improving the conversation? "More relevance means less time on the service, and that's perfectly fine," Dorsey said, adding that Twitter can still serve ads against relevant content. In terms of how the company is currently measuring its success, Dorsey said it focuses primarily on daily active users, and secondly on "conversation chains -- we want to incentivize healthy contributions back to the network."

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Put that on the side of a bus

While the UK government has been trumpeting Blighty's ambitions in the great beyond, a little bit of Scottish satellite infrastructure will close its doors for the last time this month.…