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Dell's "return to office" mandate has left employees confused about which offices they can use and the future of their jobs -- and concerned the initiative is a stealth layoff program that will disproportionately harm women at the IT giant. From a report: As El Reg broke this month, Dell told employees they each needed to choose between resuming a hybrid work schedule -- working from a corporate office part of the time -- or continue working remotely. Those who chose to remain as remote workers were effectively making a career-limiting decision. The implications of choosing to work remotely, we're told, are: "1) no funding for team onsite meetings, even if a large portion of the team is flying in for the meeting from other Dell locations; 2) no career advancement; 3) no career movements; and 4) remote status will be considered when planning or organization changes -- AKA workforce reductions." Another employee said: "Choosing to be remote does indeed put career advancement at a standstill. If you choose to accept a promotion after going remote, that comes with the requirement of being in office 39 days out of the quarter" and you have to reclassify yourself as hybrid. The employee continued: "Even if you choose to make a lateral career move, the same expectation applies. In-role promotions are possible, but rare enough to not be a realistic option."

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Tech companies are famous for coddling their workers, but after mass layoffs the industry's culture has shifted. Engineers say that getting hired can require days of work on unpaid assignments. From a report: Nearly a dozen engineers, hiring managers, and entrepreneurs who spoke with WIRED describe an environment in which technical job applicants are being put through the wringer. Take-home coding tests used to be rare, deployed only if an employer needed to be further convinced. Now interviewees are regularly given projects described as requiring just two to three hours that instead take days of work. Live-coding exercises are also more intense, industry insiders say. One job seeker described an experience where an engineering manager said during an interview, "OK, we're going to build a To Do List app right now," a process that might normally take weeks. Emails reviewed by WIRED showed that in one interview for an engineering role at Netflix, a technical recruiter requested that a job candidate submit a three-page project evaluation within 48 hours -- all before the first round of interviews. A Netflix spokesperson said the process is different for each role and otherwise declined to comment. A similar email at Snap outlined a six-part interview process for a potential engineering candidate, with each part lasting an hour. A company spokesperson says its interview process hasn't changed as a result of labor market changes.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: News publishers are worried -- with good reason -- about changes coming to Google Search. AI-generated content replacing links on some of the most valuable space on the internet, in particular, has left media types with a lot of questions, starting with "is this going to be a traffic-destroying nightmare?" The News filter disappearing from Google search results for some users this week won't help publishers sleep any easier. Google confirmed some users were not seeing the News filter as part of ongoing testing. "We're testing different ways to show filters on Search and as a result, a small subset of users were temporarily unable to access some of them," a Google spokesperson confirmed via email.

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Pair had to dodge croc on trek back to civilization

Two German tourists got more than they bargained for when they put their lives in the hands of Google Maps and blindly followed the service into the depths of the Australian jungle.…

Two days after an international team of authorities struck a major blow to LockBit, one of the Internet's most prolific ransomware syndicates, researchers have detected a new round of attacks that are installing malware associated with the group. From a report: The attacks, detected in the past 24 hours, are exploiting two critical vulnerabilities in ScreenConnect, a remote desktop application sold by Connectwise. According to researchers at two security firms -- SophosXOps and Huntress -- attackers who successfully exploit the vulnerabilities go on to install LockBit ransomware and other post-exploit malware. It wasn't immediately clear if the ransomware was the official LockBit version. "We can't publicly name the customers at this time but can confirm the malware being deployed is associated with LockBit, which is particularly interesting against the backdrop of the recent LockBit takedown," John Hammond, principal security researcher at Huntress, wrote in an email. "While we can't attribute this directly to the larger LockBit group, it is clear that LockBit has a large reach that spans tooling, various affiliate groups, and offshoots that have not been completely erased even with the major takedown by law enforcement." Hammond said the ransomware is being deployed to "vet offices, health clinics, and local governments (including attacks against systems related to 911 systems)." Further reading: US Offers Up To $15 Million For Information on LockBit Leaders.

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Humane announced that its AI Pin would start shipping in March, but there's been a small delay. From a report: Early adopters are now being told orders will arrive in mid-April at the earliest, according to a video update from Humane staffer Sam Sheffer and emails we saw in Humane's official Discord channel. On the plus side, the company says it'll now throw in three months of its pricy $24-a-month subscription for free with the $699 pin -- and will do so for any other customers who buy one before March 31st, too.

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Three top-tier X-class solar flares launched off the sun between Wednesday and Thursday. The first two occurred seven hours apart, coming in at X1.9 and X1.6 magnitude respectively. The third, the most powerful of the current 11-year "solar cycle," ranked an impressive X6.3. From a report: Solar flares, or bursts of radiation, are ranked on a scale that goes from A, B and C to M and X, in increasing order of intensity. They usually originate from sunspots, or bruiselike discolorations on the surface of the sun. Sunspots are most common near the height of the 11-year solar cycle. The current cycle, number 25, is expected to reach its peak this year. The more sunspots, the more opportunities for solar flares. Solar flares and accompanying coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, can influence "space weather" across the solar system, and even here on Earth. CMEs are slower shock waves of magnetic energy from the sun. Flares can reach Earth in minutes, but CMEs usually take at least a day. All three of the X-class solar flares disrupted shortwave radio communications on Earth. But the first two flares did not release a CME; the verdict is still out regarding whether the third flare did. High-frequency radio waves propagate by bouncing off electrons in Earth's ionosphere. That's a layer of Earth's atmosphere between 50 and 600 miles above the ground. When a solar flare occurs, that radiation travels toward Earth at the speed of light. It can ionize additional particles in the lower ionosphere. Radio waves sent from devices below it then impact that extra-ionized layer and lose energy, and aren't able to be bent by ions at the top of the ionosphere. That means signals can't travel very far, and radio blackouts are possible. Three back-to-back radio blackouts occurred in response to the trio of flares, but primarily over the Pacific and Indian oceans. They were rated "R3" or greater on a 1 through 5 scale. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, that results in a "wide area blackout of [high frequency] radio communication, [and] loss of radio contact for about an hour on sunlit side of Earth." Low-frequency navigation signals, like those used on aircraft traveling overseas, can be degraded too.

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NCA still left enough for onlookers to wonder if there's anything more to come

The grand finale of the week of LockBit leaks was slated to expose the real identity of LockBitSupp – the alias of the gang's public spokesperson – but the reveal has fallen short of expectations.…

Nvidia hit $2 trillion in market value on Friday, riding on an insatiable demand for its chips that made the Silicon Valley firm the pioneer of the generative AI boom. From a report: The milestone followed another bumper revenue forecast from the chip designer that drove up its market value by $277 billion on Thursday - Wall Street's largest one-day gain on record. Its rapid ascent in the past year has led analysts to draw parallels to the picks and shovels providers during the gold rush of 1800s as Nvidia's chips are used by almost all generative AI players from chatGPT-maker OpenAI to Google.

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Bruce66423 writes: The data watchdog has ordered a leisure centre group to stop using facial recognition tech to monitor its staff. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) says Serco Leisure has been unlawfully processing the biometric data of more than 2,000 employees at 38 UK leisure facilities. It did so to check staff attendance - a practice the ICO said was "neither fair nor proportionate." Serco Leisure says it will comply with the enforcement notice. But it added it had taken legal advice prior to installing the cameras, and said staff had not complained about them during the five years they had been in place. The firm said it was to "make clocking-in and out easier and simpler" for workers. "We engaged with our team members in advance of its roll-out and its introduction was well-received by colleagues," the company said in a statement.

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Publicity around offer breaches loan agreement, or so SEC filing alleges

MariaDB has been warned by a bank lender that it may "sweep" its accounts in retaliation for the publication of a private equity bid for the troubled database company.…

U.S. health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group said Thursday in a filing with government regulators that its subsidiary Change Healthcare was compromised likely by government-backed hackers. From a report: In a filing Thursday, UHG blamed the ongoing cybersecurity incident affecting Change Healthcare on suspected nation state hackers but said it had no timeframe for when its systems would be back online. UHG did not attribute the cyberattack to a specific nation or government, or cite what evidence it had to support its claim. Change Healthcare provides patient billing across the U.S. healthcare system. The company processes billions of healthcare transactions annually and claims it handles around one-in-three U.S. patient records, amounting to around a hundred million Americans. The cyberattack began early Wednesday, according to the company's incident tracker.

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JSTOR: At the end of 2023, JSTOR -- a vast digital library of secondary and primary sources to support teaching and learning -- reached a once unimaginable goal: providing JSTOR access in 1,000 prisons. Spread across four continents, the JSTOR Access in Prison initiative now supports the education and growth of more than 550,000 incarcerated people. Incarcerated learners have been left behind for decades. Limited access to the internet and scarce funding and support for higher education in prisons made access to digital libraries like JSTOR all but impossible. In October 2021, with funding from the Mellon Foundation, JSTOR set an ambitious goal to change that. The aspiration? For every incarcerated college student in the United States to have access to JSTOR, along with the research skills to use it and other digital resources. Prior to 2021, JSTOR developed an offline index of its digital library. At the time, less than twenty prisons had access to it. Since then, developers have created an online version that meets the unique needs of carceral settings, most recently delivering online access on tablets. These changes -- and the leadership of Stacy Burnett, a graduate of the Bard Prison Initiative who was hired to lead the JSTOR Access in Prison initiative -- have enabled 1,000 prisons and more than 500,000 people to gain access to the digital equivalent of a college library.

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Lawsuit accuses contractor and co-defendants of 'pacify and delay' tactics

Sergey Brin and two of his businesses – Google and Bayshore Global Management – are named in a lawsuit seeking damages over the death of a pilot who attempted to ferry one of Brin's airplanes from California to his private island in Fiji.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Stability AI is out today with an early preview of its Stable Diffusion 3.0 next-generation flagship text-to-image generative AI model. The new Stable Diffusion 3.0 model aims to provide improved image quality and better performance in generating images from multi-subject prompts. It will also provide significantly better typography than prior Stable Diffusion models enabling more accurate and consistent spelling inside of generated images. Typography has been an area of weakness for Stable Diffusion in the past and one that rivals including DALL-E 3, Ideogram and Midjourney have also been working on with recent releases. Stability AI is building out Stable Diffusion 3.0 in multiple model sizes ranging from 800M to 8B parameters. Stable Diffusion 3.0 isn't just a new version of a model that Stability AI has already released, it's actually based on a new architecture. "Stable Diffusion 3 is a diffusion transformer, a new type of architecture similar to the one used in the recent OpenAI Sora model," Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI told VentureBeat. "It is the real successor to the original Stable Diffusion." [...] Stable Diffusion 3.0 is taking a different approach by using diffusion transformers. "Stable Diffusion did not have a transformer before," Mostaque said. Transformers are at the foundation of much of the gen AI revolution and are widely used as the basis of text generation models. Image generation has largely been in the realm of diffusion models. The research paper that details Diffusion Transformers (DiTs), explains that it is a new architecture for diffusion models that replaces the commonly used U-Net backbone with a transformer operating on latent image patches. The DiTs approach can use compute more efficiently and can outperform other forms of diffusion image generation. The other big innovation that Stable Diffusion benefits from is flow matching. The research paper on flow matching explains that it is a new method for training Continuous Normalizing Flows (CNFs) to model complex data distributions. According to the researchers, using Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) with optimal transport paths leads to faster training, more efficient sampling, and better performance compared to diffusion paths.

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Windows 10 users would probably prefer longer support instead of prettier pics

Windows Insiders cannot get enough of AI if Microsoft is to be believed, with the company rolling out AI-infused Photo updates for Windows 10 and 11.…

Air Canada discovered the hard way that when your AI chatbot makes a commitment, your company will be on the hook for it

Opinion I keep hearing about businesses that want to fire their call center employees and front-line staffers as fast as possible and replace them with AI. They're upfront about it.…

What Linux distros could learn from the inventor of the hypervisor

FOSDEM 2024 How hard can you cut down Linux if you know it will never run on bare metal? Further than any distro vendor we know of has tried to go.…

In its fourth quarter earnings statement on Thursday, Mercedes-Benz said it is backing off its plan to only sell electric vehicles after 2030. Instead, the company said it "only expects 50 percent of its sales to be all-electric -- a significant drop from the once rosier outlook," reports The Verge. "Gas and hybrid vehicles will remain a part of the company's future for years to come." From the report: "Customers and market conditions will set the pace of the transformation," Mercedes said in its report. "The company plans to be in a position to cater to different customer needs, whether it's an all-electric drivetrain or an electrified combustion engine, until well into the 2030s." Not even in Europe, where EV sales growth outpaces North America's, does Mercedes expect to transition to EV-only sales anytime soon, the company's CEO Ola Kallenius told Reuters. "It's not going to be 100% in 2030, obviously... from the whole European market, but probably from the Mercedes side as well," he said. In 2021, Mercedes was a lot more bullish about plug-in powertrains, saying that by 2030 it would only sell EVs and completely phase out gas-powered vehicles.

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Sometimes the best form of revenge is doing nothing – very politely

On Call Taylor Swift is playing in On Call's town tonight, creating a city-wide Friday frenzy. Here at The Register we prefer to end the working week in a gentler fashion by offering a fresh installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we share stories of haters who hated IT, fakers who faked technical nous, and techies who shook it off and got the job done.…