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AT&T has launched a new Account Lock feature designed to protect customers from SIM swapping attacks. The security tool, available through the myAT&T app, prevents unauthorized changes to customer accounts including phone number transfers, SIM card changes, billing information updates, device upgrades, and modifications to authorized users. SIM swapping attacks occur when criminals obtain a victim's phone number through social engineering techniques, then intercept messages and calls to access two-factor authentication codes for sensitive accounts. The attacks have become increasingly common in recent years. AT&T began gradually rolling out Account Lock earlier this year, joining T-Mobile, Verizon, and Google Fi, which already offer similar fraud prevention features.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A judge has sentenced a disgruntled IT worker to more than seven months in prison after he wreaked havoc on his employer's network following his suspension, according to West Yorkshire Police. According to the police, Mohammed Umar Taj, 31, from the Yorkshire town of Batley, was suspended from his job in nearby Huddersfield in July 2022. But the company didn't immediately rescind his network credentials, and within hours, he began altering login names and passwords to disrupt operations, the statement says. The following day, he allegedly changed access credentials and the biz's multi-factor authentication settings that locked out the firm and its clients in Germany and Bahrain, eventually causing an estimated $274,200 in lost business and reputational harm.

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Customizations not saved with security baseline policy update

Microsoft Intune administrators may face a few days of stress after Redmond acknowledged a problem with security baseline customizations.…

AI agents are now conducting first-round job interviews to screen candidates before human recruiters review them, according to WashingtonPost, which cites job seekers who report being contacted by virtual recruiters from different staffing companies. The conversational agents, built on large language models, help recruiting firms respond to every applicant and conduct interviews around the clock as companies face increasingly large talent pools. LinkedIn reported that job applications have jumped 30% in the last two years, partially due to AI, with some positions receiving hundreds of applications within hours. The Society for Human Resource Management said a growing number of organizations now use AI for recruiting to automate candidate searches and communicate with applicants during interviews. The AI interviews, conducted by phone or video, can last anywhere from a few minutes to 20 minutes depending on the candidate's experience and the hiring firm's questions.

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Trump's budget bill moves back to the House with some mods

It took a tie-breaking vote from the Vice President JD Vance to pass Trump's budget reconciliation bill through the Senate on Tuesday, but a controversial section that would have barred states from regulating AI was struck down in a much clearer fashion. …

Cloudflare today announced a "Pay Per Crawl" program that allows website owners to charge AI companies for accessing their content, a potential revenue stream for publishers whose work is increasingly being scraped to train AI models. The system uses HTTP response code 402 to enable content creators to set per-request prices across their sites. Publishers can choose to allow free access, require payment at a configured rate, or block crawlers entirely. When an AI crawler requests paid content, it either presents payment intent via request headers for successful access or receives a "402 Payment Required" response with pricing information. Cloudflare acts as the merchant of record and handles the underlying technical infrastructure. The company aggregates billing events, charges crawlers, and distributes earnings to publishers. Alongside Pay Per Crawl, Cloudflare has switched to blocking AI crawlers by default for its customers, becoming the first major internet infrastructure provider to require explicit permission for AI access. The company handles traffic for 20% of the web and more than one million customers have already activated its AI-blocking tools since their September 2024 launch, it wrote in a blog post.

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R&D teams are 'separable' says biz, which is open to offers for parts or the whole

European RISC-V biz Codasip has put itself up for sale, citing an expression of interest during a recent funding round, and is now openly touting for buyers.…

He didn't cover his tracks very well, the iGiant claims in a court filing

An ex-Apple employee who allegedly thought he was clever enough to sneak out the back door to a job at Snap loaded up with Cupertino's secrets has instead found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit. …

Tech companies are paying AI engineers unprecedented salaries as competition for talent intensifies, with some top engineers earning more than $10 million annually and typical packages ranging from $3 million to $7 million. OpenAI told staff this week it is seeking "creative ways to recognize and reward top talent" after losing key employees to rivals, despite offering salaries near the top of the market. The move followed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's claim that Meta had promised $100 million sign-on bonuses to the company's most high-profile AI engineers. Mark Chen, OpenAI's chief research officer, sent an internal memo saying he felt "as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something" after recent departures. AI engineer salaries have risen approximately 50% since 2022, with mid-to-senior level research scientists now earning $500,000 to $2 million at major tech companies, compared to $180,000 to $220,000 for senior software engineers without AI experience.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Summer started barely a week ago, and already the United States has been smothered in a record-breaking "heat dome." Alaska saw its first-ever heat advisory this month. And all of this comes on the heels of 2024, the hottest calendar year in recorded history. The world is getting hotter, faster. A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now increasing by 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. That rate was recorded at 0.2 degrees in the 1970s, and has been growing since. "Each additional fractional degree of warming brings about a relatively larger increase in atmospheric extremes, like extreme downpours and severe droughts and wildfires," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California. While this aligns with scientific predictions of how climate change can intensify such events, the increase in severity may feel sudden to people who experience them. "Back when we had lesser levels of warming, that relationship was a little bit less dramatic," Dr. Swain said. "There is growing evidence that the most extreme extremes probably will increase faster and to a greater extent than we used to think was the case," he added. Take rainfall, for example. Generally, extreme rainfall is intensifying at a rate of 7 percent with each degree Celsius of atmospheric warming. But recent studies indicate that so-called record-shattering events are increasing at double that rate, Dr. Swain said.

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Body stays coy on details but alludes to similarities with 2023 espionage campaign

The International Criminal Court (ICC) says a "sophisticated" cyberattack targeted the institution, the second such incident in two years.…

The FCC will suspend enforcement of rules that would lower prison phone and video call prices until April 1st, 2027. Trump-appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr said that prisons won't have to comply with the pricing regulations [PDF], reversing plans to implement the caps this year. The rules would have dropped the price of a 15-minute phone call to 90 cents in larger prisons. Current fees can reach as high as $11.35 for a 15-minute call, which the FCC described in 2024 as "exorbitant." Four states -- Connecticut, California, Minnesota, and Massachusetts -- have made prison calls free. Former President Joe Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed law in 2023, allowing the FCC to regulate prison call rates. The agency voted to adopt the new rates last year, with rules set to take effect on a staggered basis starting January 1st, 2025. Carr said the regulations are "leading to negative, unintended consequences" and would make caps "too low" to cover "required safety measures." FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez criticized the delay, stating the Commission "is now stalling, shielding a broken system that inflates costs and rewards kickbacks to correctional facilities."

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Encrypted communications provider Proton has joined an antitrust lawsuit against Apple, filing a legal complaint that claims the company's App Store practices harm developers, consumers, and privacy. The Switzerland-based firm joined a group of Korean developers who sued Apple in May rather than filing a separate case. Proton asked the US District Court for Northern California to require Apple to allow alternative app stores, expose those stores through its own App Store, permit developers to disable Apple's in-app payment system, and provide full access to Apple APIs. The company added a privacy-focused argument to typical antitrust complaints, contending that Apple's pricing model particularly penalizes companies that refuse to harvest user data. Developers of free apps typically sell user data to cover costs, while privacy-focused companies like Proton must charge subscriptions for revenue, making Apple's commission cuts more burdensome.

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Community vetoes plans to axe i686 compatibility and switch X11 forks

The Fedora community has quickly dropped a couple of recent proposed changes – one highly controversial, the other rather less so.…

Starting today, researchers funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be required to make their scientific papers available to read for free as soon as they are published in a peer-reviewed journal. That's according to the agency's latest public-access policy, aimed at making federally funded research accessible to taxpayers. From a report: Established under former US president Joe Biden, the policy was originally set to take effect on 31 December for all US agencies, but the administration of Biden's successor, Donald Trump, has accelerated its implementation for the NIH, a move that has surprised some scholars. That's because, although the Trump team has declared itself a defender of taxpayer dollars, it has also targeted programmes and research projects focused on equity and inclusion for elimination. And one of the policy's main goals is to ensure equitable access to federally funded research. The move means that universities will have less time to advise their researchers on how to comply with the policy, says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There is usually "some confusion or even some non-compliance after a new policy takes effect, but I think universities will eventually get on top of that," he says.

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Stricken probe giving US space agency the silent treatment

NASA has extended recovery efforts for its stricken Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft to mid-July, but is warning that if the probe remains silent, the mission could end.…

176 expressions of interest to erect 'gigafactories' across 16 member states, with 3 million GPUs needed

It's pork barrel time in Europe for Nvidia (and possibly AMD) as corporations bid for a slice of the €20 billion ($23.6 billion) fund to build proposed AI Gigafactories to advance the EU's AI credentials.…

India's automakers are opposing the government's proposal to cut car emissions by 33% from 2027, calling the target "too aggressive" in a formal submission to the power ministry. The Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers warned the plan risks billions of rupees in penalties and threatens future investments in the $137-billion auto sector. The proposal represents more than twice the pace of India's previous emission reduction target and forms part of the third phase of Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency norms first introduced in 2017. The industry body wants a more gradual 15% reduction target and opposes different standards for small versus heavy vehicles.

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Copilot's confidence was... misplaced

Not content with humiliating ChatGPT at the hands of Video Chess on an Atari 2600 emulator, Robert Caruso has tried again, this time with Microsoft's Copilot.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Monday that it had taken several enforcement actions against North Korea's money-making operations, which rely on undercover remote IT workers inside American tech companies to raise funds for the regime's nuclear weapons program, as well as to steal data and cryptocurrency. As part of the DOJ's multi-state effort, the government announced the arrest and indictment of U.S. national Zhenxing "Danny" Wang, who allegedly ran a years-long fraud scheme from New Jersey to sneak remote North Korean IT workers inside U.S. tech companies. According to the indictment, the scheme generated more than $5 million in revenue for the North Korean regime. [...] From 2021 until 2024, the co-conspirators allegedly impersonated more than 80 U.S. individuals to get remote jobs at more than 100 American companies, causing $3 million in damages due to legal fees, data breach remediation efforts, and more. The group is said to have run laptop farms inside the United States, which the North Korean IT workers could essentially use as proxies to hide their provenance, according to the DOJ. At times, they used hardware devices known as keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) switches, which allow one person to control multiple computers from a single keyboard and mouse. The group allegedly also ran shell companies inside the U.S. to make it seem like the North Korean IT workers were affiliated with legitimate local companies, and to receive money that would then be transferred abroad, the DOJ said. The fraudulent scheme allegedly also involved the North Korean workers stealing sensitive data, such as source code, from the companies they were working for, such as from an unnamed California-based defense contractor "that develops artificial intelligence-powered equipment and technologies."

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