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You didn't have anything else to do this Tuesday, right?

VMware and Atlassian today disclosed critical vulnerabilities and, while neither appear to have been exploited by miscreants yet, admins should patch now to avoid disappointment.…

Ken Fritz turned his home into an audiophile's dream -- the world's greatest hi-fi. What would it mean in the end? From a report: Ken Fritz was years into his quest to build the world's greatest stereo when he realized it would take more than just gear. It would take more than the Krell amplifiers and the Ampex reel-to-reel. More than the trio of 10-foot speakers he envisioned crafting by hand. And it would take more than what would come to be the crown jewel of his entire system: the $50,000 custom record player, his "Frankentable," nestled in a 1,500-pound base designed to thwart any needle-jarring vibrations and equipped with three different tone arms, each calibrated to coax a different sound from the same slab of vinyl. "If I play jazz, maybe that cartridge might bloom a little more than the other two," Fritz explained to me. "On classical, maybe this one." No, building the world's greatest stereo would mean transforming the very space that surrounded it -- and the lives of the people who dwelt there. The faded photos tell the story of how the Fritz family helped him turn the living room of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Road in Richmond's North Chesterfield neighborhood into something of a concert hall -- an environment precisely engineered for the one-of-a-kind acoustic majesty he craved. In one snapshot, his three daughters hold up new siding for their expanding home. In another, his two boys pose next to the massive speaker shells. There's the man of the house himself, a compact guy with slicked-back hair and a thin goatee, on the floor making adjustments to the system. He later estimated he spent $1 million on his mission, a number that did not begin to reflect the wear and tear on the household, the hidden costs of his children's unpaid labor.

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Makes sense since the global market fell 11% in 2023

China's imports of semiconductors and integrated circuits were hit by their largest ever drop last year, although chips are said to remain the country's biggest import item.…

For the first time ever, Apple beat out Samsung to ship the most smartphones in a year according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. From a report: Although IDC cautions that its data is preliminary and subject to change, a second research agency, Canalys, also has Apple taking its top spot for all of 2023. IDC has Apple's total mobile shipments at 234.6 million, versus 226.6 million for Samsung. Xiaomi, Oppo, and Transsion round out the top five with 145.9, 103.1 and 94.9 million smartphones shipped, respectively. IDC notes that the last time Samsung wasn't on top of the annual board was 13 years ago in 2010. Back then Apple didn't even feature in the top five. Instead it was Nokia in first place, Samsung in second, LG Electronics in third, ZTE in fourth, and Research in Motion (manufacturers of BlackBerry devices) in fifth.

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Majority of public-facing devices still unpatched against critical vulns from as far back as 2022

More than 178,000 SonicWall firewalls are still vulnerable to years-old vulnerabilities, an infosec reseacher claims.…

A quarter of global chief executives expect the deployment of generative AI to lead to headcount reductions of at least 5 percent this year, according to a survey unveiled as world and business leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland. FT: Industries led by media and entertainment, banking, insurance, and logistics were most likely to predict job losses because of cutting-edge AI tools, according to the poll of top directors conducted by PwC ahead of this week's World Economic Forum. Engineering and construction firms were least likely to anticipate cuts because of automation, alongside technology companies. Some 46 percent of those surveyed said they expect the use of generative AI -- systems that can spew out humanlike text, images, and code in seconds -- to boost profitability in the next 12 months, the survey added. However, 47 percent said the technology will deliver little or no change. The findings, based on interviews with 4,702 company chiefs spread across 105 countries, point to the far-reaching impacts that AI models are expected to have on economies and societies, a topic that will feature prominently at the annual meetings.

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SpaceX gets chance to prove the FCC was wrong for rejecting its $885m rural broadband subsidy bid

Farm equipment maker John Deere has signed a deal with SpaceX to use its Starlink satellite internet service to keep combines and other farm equipment connected to the internet in underserved rural areas.…

Unlikely to be a stop-the-slurpage button, but look at the wallpaper

A visualization of what Windows 12 – or whatever Microsoft decides to call its upcoming OS – might look like has arrived, and it is expectedly heavy on AI integration.…

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a challenge by Apple to a lower court's decision requiring changes to certain rules in its lucrative App Store, as the justices shunned the lengthy legal battle between the iPhone maker and Epic Games, maker of the popular video game "Fortnite." Reuters: The justices also turned away Epic's appeal of the lower court's ruling that Apple's App Store policies limiting how software is distributed and paid for do not violate federal antitrust laws. The justices gave no reasons for their decision to deny the appeals. In a series of posts on X, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney wrote: The Supreme Court denied both sides' appeals of the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. The court battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States. A sad outcome for all developers. Now the District Court's injunction against Apple's anti-steering rule is in effect, and developers can include in their apps "buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to IAP." As of today, developers can begin exercising their court-established right to tell US customers about better prices on the web. These awful Apple-mandated confusion screens are over and done forever. The fight goes on. Regulators are taking action and policymakers around the world are passing new laws to end Apple's illegal and anticompetitive app store practices. The European Union's Digital Markets Act goes into effect March 7.

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Shipments grow in Q4 after near two years of declines, and Huawei making a comeback in China

Apple's iPhone is the frontrunner in the global smartphone market for the first time after demand finally returned to a sector that has shrunk for almost two years.…

Adobe has introduced new AI features to Premiere Pro to streamline audio editing workflows. Updates in the public beta launching Tuesday include interactive fade handles for quicker custom audio transitions, and enhanced speech correction tools to improve dialogue quality. Other additions are AI-powered tagging that automatically identifies and labels audio clips by category, reducing time spent manually locating editing tools. Redesigned clip badges also aim to speed up identifying and applying audio effects. The updates ultimately target reducing repetitive editing tasks and giving users easier access to common audio editing functions directly in Premiere Pro's main timeline interface. The Verge adds: Additional quality-of-life improvements being added to the Premiere Pro beta include having waveforms (the graphical representation of sound patterns) automatically resize when track height is adjusted in the editing timeline, and updated colors for clips that make them easier to see. These should grant editors more control over how their timeline can be visually customized to achieve a layout that best complements their personal workflow.

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Customers still patchless and mitigation only goes so far

There's a "reasonable chance" that Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) VPN users are already compromised if they didn't apply the vulnerability mitigation released last week, experts say.…

Synopsys, a chip-design company, agreed to acquire software developer Ansys for about $35 billion in enterprise value. From a report: Ansys shareholders will receive $197 in cash and 0.345 shares of Synopsys stock per share, according to an announcement by the companies Tuesday. The takeover of Ansys is one of the largest transactions globally of the past 12 months and provides an early boost for dealmakers in 2024 as they seek to move on from a lackluster period of mergers and acquisitions activity. Synopsys, based in Sunnyvale, California, is one of a few major companies that make software used to design semiconductors, competing primarily with Cadence Design Systems Inc.

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Not all batteries like subzero temperatures

This week's frigid winter conditions in North America exposed the shortcomings of certain electric vehicles, particularly Teslas.…

Calls for stronger team play in the global economic tournament

The EU needs to get serious and act more decisively and collectively if it wants economic security, especially in advanced technology, as it is trailing global rivals such as Japan, China, and the US.…

With the pre-release of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown started, Ubisoft has chosen this week to rebrand its Ubisoft+ subscription services, and introduce a PC version of the "Classics" tier at a lower price. And a big part of this, says the publisher's director of subscriptions, Philippe Tremblay, is getting players "comfortable" with not owning their games. Kotaku: It's hard to keep up with how often Ubisoft has rebranded its online portals for its games, with Uplay, Ubisoft Game Launcher, Ubisoft Connect, Uplay+, Uplay Passport, Ubisoft Club, and now Ubisoft+ Premium and Ubisoft+ Classics, all names used over the last decade or so. It's also seemed faintly bewildering why there's a demand for any of them, given Ubisoft released only five non-mobile games last year. However, a demand there apparently is, says Tremblay in an interview with GI.biz. He claims the company's subscription service had its biggest ever month October 2023, and that the service has had "millions" of subscribers, and "over half a billion hours" played. [...] What's more chilling about all this, however, is when Tremblay moves on to how Ubisoft wishes to see a "consumer shift," similar to that of the market for CDs and DVDs, where people have moved over to Spotify and Netflix, instead of buying physical media to keep on their own shelves. Given that most people, while being a part of the problem (hello), also think of this as a problem, it's so weird to see it phrased as if some faulty thinking in the company's audience. He said: "One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That's a transformation that's been a bit slower to happen [in games]. As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect... you don't lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game."

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AI for customers and staff, while Euro bitbarns shifted to Azure

Microsoft and Vodafone have inked a 10-year deal worth $1.5 billion, resulting in the telecommunication giant shuttering physical datacenters across Europe in favor of virtual ones using Azure.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The world could have its first trillionaire within a decade, anti-poverty organization Oxfam International said Monday in its annual assessment of global inequalities timed to the gathering of political and business elites at the Swiss ski resort of Davos. Oxfam, which for years has been trying to highlight the growing disparities between the super-rich and the bulk of the global population during the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, reckons the gap has been "supercharged" since the coronavirus pandemic. The group said the fortunes of the five richest men -- Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault and his family of luxury company LVMH, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and investment guru Warren Buffett -- have spiked by 114% in real terms since 2020, when the world was reeling from the pandemic. Oxfam's interim executive director said the report showed that the world is entering a "decade of division." "We have the top five billionaires, they have doubled their wealth. On the other hand, almost 5 billion people have become poorer," Amitabh Behar said in an interview in Davos, Switzerland, where the forum's annual meeting takes place this week. "Very soon, Oxfam predicts that we will have a trillionaire within a decade," Behar said, referring to a person who has a thousand billion dollars. "Whereas to fight poverty, we need more than 200 years." If someone does reach that trillion-dollar milestone -- and it could be someone not even on any list of richest people right now -- he or she would have the same value as oil-rich Saudi Arabia. [...] To calculate the top five richest billionaires, Oxfam used figures from Forbes as of November 2023. Their total wealth then was $869 billion, up from $340 billion in March 2020, a nominal increase of 155%. For the bottom 60% of the global population, Oxfam used figures from the UBS Global Wealth Report 2023 and from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2019. Both used the same methodology. Some of the measures Oxfam said should be considered to reduce global inequality include the permanent taxation of the wealthiest in every country, more effective taxation of big corporations and a renewed drive against tax avoidance. "To end extreme inequality, governments must radically redistribute the power of billionaires and corporations back to ordinary people," reports Oxfam. "A more equal world is possible if governments effectively regulate and reimagine the private sector."

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Good progress for penguinistas keen on Macs

The Asahi Linux team has followed up the release of Fedora Asahi Remix with a post detailing the progress of the project to bring Linux to Apple silicon.…

Spending watchdog slams reliance on outdated systems and poor governance

The UK’s chief auditor has claimed the government could save at least £20 billion by modernizing IT systems and other measures.…