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UnknowingFool writes: An engineering sample of Intel's next flagship processor, the i9-12900K, was shown to beat AMD's current flagship 5950X in Cinebench R20 by 18% in multi-core and 28% in single-core tests. The next generation of Intel processors is believed to use a hybrid big.LITTLE design where 8 of its 16 cores are for low power usage and 8 are for full power. The low power cores only run in single thread where the high power cores can run 2 threads. No official word on pricing or release date from Intel though but engineering samples and B600 motherboards are being sold in China for $1,250 and $1,150, respectively. According to leaker OneRaichu, the results for the 12900K were gathered using water-cooling and without overclocking, so it's possible the final score could be even higher. The rumors suggest the processor will come with 16 cores and 24 threads with a boost clock speed of up to 5.3GHz.

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Learn tricks of the trade at SANS Singapore 2021 – and treat yourself to a discount

Promo Whisper it softly, but we’re fast forwarding through the second half of 2021, which means the holiday shopping season – and accompanying hacking season – is not far behind.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The video game studio behind the hit franchises Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush is facing a civil lawsuit in California over allegations of gender discrimination, sexual harassment and potential violations of the state's equal pay law. A complaint, filed by the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing on Wednesday, alleges that Activision Blizzard Inc. "fostered a sexist culture" where women were paid less than men and subjected to ongoing sexual harassment including groping. (Activision and Blizzard Entertainment merged in 2008.) Officials at the gaming company knew about the harassment and not only failed to stop it but retaliated against women who spoke up, the complaint also alleges. Years after the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate targeted women in the video game world, the California lawsuit depicts an industry that can still be unwelcoming and even hostile to female employees. "All employers should ensure that their employees are being paid equally and take all steps to prevent discrimination, harassment, and retaliation," said DFEH Director Kevin Kish. "This is especially important for employers in male-dominated industries, such as technology and gaming." The lawsuit alleges that Activision Blizzard's female workers who spoke to investigators "almost universally confirmed" that their time at the company was "akin to working in a frat house." Male employees drank on the job and came to work hungover, the lawsuit said. The alleged sexual harassment ranged from comments about women's bodies and jokes about rape to the unwanted touching of female employees by their male peers. The complaint, which was the result of a two-year investigation by DFEH, claims that the unequal treatment of women went beyond company culture to the more formal parts of their jobs. Women were allegedly paid less than men, both when they were hired and during the course of their employment. They were also assigned to lower-level positions and passed over for promotions, despite doing more work than their male peers in some cases, according to the lawsuit. One woman said her manager told her she wouldn't be promoted because "she might get pregnant and like being a mom too much." The sex discrimination was even worse for women of color, the suit claims. At least two African-American women reported being singled out and micromanaged. Some of the women who came forward with complaints of discrimination or harassment faced involuntary transfers, were selected for layoffs or were denied certain opportunities, the suit said. In a statement, an Activision Blizzard spokesperson said the company had worked to improve its company culture in recent years and accused the DFEH of not adequately trying to resolve the claims against it before resorting to a lawsuit. "The DFEH includes distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard's past," the statement read. "The picture the DFEH paints is not the Blizzard workplace of today." In response to the company's rebuttal, former Blizzard Entertainment employee Cher Scarlett tweeted: "This is certainly LONG overdue. I would be hard-pressed to find someone that wasn't witness to sex in the game lounges, coke in the bathrooms during a cube crawl, or a woman who wasn't sexually harassed at least once. I am so proud of these women." Scarlett added: "Blizzard has claimed that the DFEH report is false/misleading/irresponsible. I can tell you that I knew what was going to be in this report before I read it because during my time there - for only a YEAR - I witnessed ALL OF THESE THINGS. AND NAME NAMES."

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Two Democratic senators introduced a bill Thursday that would strip away the liability shield that social media platforms hold dear when those companies are found to have boosted anti-vaccine conspiracies and other kinds of health misinformation. From a report: The Health Misinformation Act, introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), would create a new carve-out in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to hold platforms liable for algorithmically-promoted health misinformation and conspiracies. Platforms rely on Section 230 to protect them from legal liability for the vast amount of user-created content they host. "For far too long, online platforms have not done enough to protect the health of Americans," Klobuchar said. "These are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world and they must do more to prevent the spread of deadly vaccine misinformation." The bill would specifically alter Section 230's language to revoke liability protections in the case of "health misinformation that is created or developed through the interactive computer service" if that misinformation is amplified through an algorithm. The proposed exception would only kick in during a declared national public health crisis, like the advent of Covid-19, and wouldn't apply in normal times.

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Giant news org megaphone persuades dim algos they're talking about the other sort of hoes

A Facebook group dedicated to gardening in western New York state is celebrating a victory over the company's algorithms after having been repeatedly threatened with censure and deletion due to use of the word "hoe".…

India's central bank is considering launching a digital currency, according to a top executive, giving a clear indication of its intentions for the first time after previously stating that it was studying the idea. From a report: T Rabi Sankar, the deputy governor of Reserve Bank of India, said at a conference today that the central bank is considering introducing the nation's digital currency in a "phased" manner while legal changes are made to the South Asian nation's foreign-exchange rules and IT laws. The digital currency, which will be backed by sovereign, will lower the economy's reliance on cash, enable cheaper and smoother international settlements, and protect people from the volatility of privacy cryptocurrencies, he said. "Every idea has to wait for its time, and the time for CBDC [central bank digital currency] is near. We have carefully evaluated the risks," he told an audience at a conference held by think-tank Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.

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Google says it has fixed a major Chrome OS bug that locked users out of their devices. Google's bulletin says that Chrome OS version 91.0.4472.165, which was briefly available this week, renders users unable to log in to their devices, essentially bricking them. From a report: Chrome OS automatically downloads updates and switches to the new version after a reboot, so users who reboot their devices are suddenly locked out them. The go-to advice while this broken update is out there is to not reboot. The bulletin says that a new build, version 91.0.4472.167, is rolling out now to fix the issue, but it could take a "few days" to hit everyone. Users affected by the bad update can either wait for the device to update again or "powerwash" their device -- meaning wipe all the local data -- to get logged in. Chrome OS is primarily cloud-based, so if you're not doing something advanced like running Linux apps, this solution presents less of an inconvenience than it would on other operating systems. Still, some users are complaining about lost data.

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'We need to hold each other to account when we're talking through these issues'

A survey of astronomers and geophysicists has unveiled a "systemic bullying problem" which is "disproportionately worse" for women and members of minority groups, already under-represented in the field.…

New submitter Goatbot writes: Another day another telco failure. Freedom Mobile repeatedly reassigned a customer's phone number. From the report: A Toronto-area woman says Freedom Mobile is still assigning her cell number to other people, even though she took the number with her when she moved to a new provider last year. Tsahai Carter, 22, made the switch last August. Since then, she says, on three separate occasions she's received phone calls and text messages intended for other people who'd been assigned the same number by Freedom Mobile. Carter, who lives north of Toronto in Markham, Ont., has also fielded phone calls from frustrated customers, wondering why someone else is getting their calls and messages. "They're getting mad at me for taking over their phone number, when really I had nothing to do with it," said Carter. "So it's a bit stressful." This isn't the first time Freedom Mobile customers have complained about a mix-up in phone numbers. In 2019, CBC reported on another customer who'd been given a number by Freedom Mobile that was still in use by someone else: a man who'd ported the number with him when he moved from Freedom to Fido.

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Update now – and maybe firewall the thing off while you're at it

Atlassian has warned Jira Data Center users of a critical vulnerability, offering attackers the opportunity for arbitrary remote code execution – and they're easily exploited over the network.…

Alphabet's Google will now show its search engine users more information about why it found the results they are shown, the company said on Thursday. From a report: It said people googling queries will now be able to click into details such as how their result matched certain search terms, in order to better decide if the information is relevant.

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It's the only way to be sure

After setting the "days since a security cock-up" counter back to zero, Microsoft has published an official workaround for its Access Control Lists (ACLs) vulnerability (CVE-2021-36934).…

After years of warning from researchers, journalists, and even governments, someone used highly sensitive location data from a smartphone app to track and publicly harass a specific person. From a report: In this case, Catholic Substack publication The Pillar said it used location data ultimately tied to Grindr to trace the movements of a priest, and then outed him publicly as potentially gay without his consent. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the outing led to his resignation. The news starkly demonstrates not only the inherent power of location data, but how the chance to wield that power has trickled down from corporations and intelligence agencies to essentially any sort of disgruntled, unscrupulous, or dangerous individual. A growing market of data brokers that collect and sell data from countless apps has made it so that anyone with a bit of cash and effort can figure out which phone in a so-called anonymized dataset belongs to a target, and abuse that information. "Experts have warned for years that data collected by advertising companies from Americans' phones could be used to track them and reveal the most personal details of their lives. Unfortunately, they were right," Senator Ron Wyden told Motherboard in a statement, responding to the incident

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If you're wondering why some websites disappeared today

Updated Akamai's Edge DNS service went down on Thursday morning, US West Coast time, knocking over its customers' websites as it fell.…

The nation's big TV companies are calling for a new yardstick. From a report: A trade organization representing Disney, ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, Fox Corp. and other media giants is calling for the organization that signs off on Nielsen's methodology for measuring TV viewership to yank accreditation, an aggressive maneuver in an era when media outlets and the advertisers who support them are scrambling to figure out how to count viewer eyeballs across an increasingly unwieldy array of new entertainment venues, digital behaviors and screens. The trade group, the VAB, on Wednesday sent a ten-page letter to the Media Rating Council urging the group to pull its backing of Nielsen's ratings, citing Nielsen's diminished ability to count viewership during the coronavirus pandemic. "Nielsen's COVID-period conduct as a ratings service violated at least five minimum standards," the VAB said in its letter, "with the damage done to their largest subscriber clients still creating material negative impact into July 2021."

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At least Redmond is taking some security seriously

Microsoft has snapped up cloud security outfit CloudKnox while researchers continue to poke holes in its down-to-earth Windows operating system.…

Nauka? More like 'Borka!' Geddit?

Russia's latest contribution to the International Space Station (ISS), successfully launched yesterday, but appears to have run into problems on orbit.…

Last year the artificial intelligence group DeepMind cracked a mystery that has flummoxed scientists for decades: stripping bare the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life. Now, having amassed a database of nearly all human protein structures, the company is making the resource available online free for researchers to use. From a report: The key to understanding our basic biological machinery is its architecture. The chains of amino acids that comprise proteins twist and turn to make the most confounding of 3D shapes. It is this elaborate form that explains protein function; from enzymes that are crucial to metabolism to antibodies that fight infectious attacks. Despite years of onerous and expensive lab work that began in the 1950s, scientists have only decoded the structure of a fraction of human proteins. DeepMind's AI program, AlphaFold, has predicted the structure of nearly all 20,000 proteins expressed by humans. In an independent benchmark test that compared predictions to known structures, the system was able to predict the shape of a protein to a good standard 95% of time. DeepMind, which has partnered with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), hopes the database will help researchers to analyse how life works at an atomic scale by unpacking the apparatus that drives some diseases, make strides in the field of personalised medicine, create more nutritious crops and develop "green enzymes" that can break down plastic.

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Some of the stuff going on in the industry is completely out of order

A new initiative aims to make it easier to report personal abuse and harassment within the information security industry – without the involvement of social media mobs.…

A new video investigation by the Wall Street Journal finds the key to TikTok's success in how the short-video sharing app monitors viewing times. From a report: TikTok is known for the fiendishly effective way that it selects streams of videos tailored to each user's taste. The algorithm behind this personalization is the company's prize asset -- and, like those that power Google and Facebook, it's a secret. WSJ created a batch of individualized dummy accounts to throw at TikTok and test how it homed in on each fake persona's traits. TikTok responds most sensitively to a single signal -- how long a user lingers over a video. It starts by showing new users very popular items, and sees which catch their eyes.

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