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ACM salutes Databricks co-founder Matei Zaharia with $250K prize

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded its annual Prize in Computing to Matei Zaharia for his work developing open source data and analytics software, including the widely used Apache Spark analytics engine.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: [Five skilled workers aged 50 and older spoke] to the Guardian about how, after struggling to find work in their fields, they have turned to an emerging and growing category of work: using their expertise to train artificial intelligence models. Known as data annotation, the work involves labeling and evaluating the information used to train AI models like Open AI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini. A doctor, for example, might review how an AI model answers medical questions to flag incorrect or unsafe responses and suggest better ones, helping the system learn how to generate more accurate and reliable responses. The ultimate goal of training is to level up AI models until they're capable of doing a job as well as a human could -- meaning they could someday replace some of these human workers. The companies behind AI training, such as Mercor, GlobalLogic, TEKsystems, micro1 and Alignerr, operate large contractor networks staffed by people like Ciriello. Their clients include tech giants like OpenAI, Google and Meta, academic researchers and industries including healthcare and finance. For experienced professionals, AI training contracts can be a side hustle -- or a temporary fallback following a layoff -- where top experts can, in some cases, earn over $180 an hour. But that's on the high end. For some older workers [...], it represents another thing entirely: a last refuge in a brutal job market that is harder to stay in, or re-enter, the older they get. For many of them, whether or not they're training their AI replacements in their professions is besides the point. They need the work now. [...] "There's just a lot of desperation out there," Johnson said. As opportunities narrow, many turn to what Joanna Lahey, a professor at Texas A&M University who studies age discrimination and labor outcomes, calls "bridge jobs" -- lower-paying, less demanding roles that help workers stay financially afloat as they approach retirement. Historically, that meant taking temp assignments, retail and fast-food work and gig roles like Uber and food delivery. Now, for skilled workers -- engineers, lawyers, nurses or designers, for example -- using their expertise for AI data training is becoming the new bridge job. "[AI] training work may be better in some ways than those earlier alternatives," Lahey told the Guardian. AI training can offer flexibility, quick income and intellectual engagement. But it's often a clear step down. Professionals in fields such as software development, medicine or finance typically earn six-figure salaries that come with benefits and paid leave, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to online job postings, AI training gigs start at $20 an hour, with pay increasing to between $30 and $40 an hour. In some cases, AI trainers with coveted subject matter expertise can earn over $100 an hour. AI training is contract-based, though, meaning the pay and hours are unstable, and it often doesn't come with benefits.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arm support is on the agenda, too, because AI is going to run on everything

Exclusive Nutanix plans to support KubeVirt to allow its customers to run both containers and VMs on the edge.…

UK and US customers stuck waiting after fleet management SaaS vendor took affected environments offline

A cybersecurity incident has knocked FleetWave into a "major outage" across the UK and US after Chevin Fleet Solutions pulled parts of its SaaS platform offline and left customers scrambling for answers.…

BrianFagioli writes: Little Snitch, the well known macOS tool that shows which applications are connecting to the internet, is now being developed for Linux. The developer says the project started after experimenting with Linux and realizing how strange it felt not knowing what connections the system was making. Existing tools like OpenSnitch and various command line utilities exist, but none provided the same simple experience of seeing which process is connecting where and blocking it with a click. The Linux version uses eBPF for kernel level traffic interception, with core components written in Rust and a web based interface that can even monitor remote Linux servers. During testing on Ubuntu, the developer noticed the system was relatively quiet on the network. Over the course of a week, only nine system processes made internet connections. By comparison, macOS reportedly showed more than one hundred processes communicating externally. Applications behave similarly across platforms though. Launching Firefox immediately triggered telemetry and advertising related connections, while LibreOffice made no network connections at all during testing. The early release is meant primarily as a transparency tool to show what software is doing on the network rather than a hardened security firewall.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sam Altman's datacenter dreams hit a wall of watts and wonkery, cooling Britain's AI ambitions

OpenAI is pausing its planned Stargate datacenter project in the UK just months after announcing it, citing the regulatory environment and cost of energy as reasons for putting it on hold.…

Malicious PDFs abuse legit features to harvest system data and decide which victims get a 2nd-stage payload

Hackers have been quietly exploiting what appears to be a zero-day in Adobe Acrobat Reader for months, using booby-trapped PDFs to profile targets and decide who's worth fully compromising.…

No emails, no warnings, no humans – just bots, catch-22s, and a 60-day appeals queue

Microsoft says that it will work on how it communicates with developers after two leading open source figures were suddenly locked out of their accounts, leaving them unable to sign updates.…

Memory costs were already through the roof - now freight's spiking too, and budget systems face extinction

America's war with Iran is jacking up the pressure on computing markets already struggling with memory shortages and component cost inflation, meaning buyers should brace themselves for even higher prices this year.…

Wash your mouth out with digital soap

Apple Intelligence, the personal AI system integrated into newer Macs, iPhones, and other iThings, can be hijacked using prompt injection, forcing the model into producing an attacker-controlled result and putting millions of users at risk, researchers have shown.…

Departure may accelerate further AI-centric moves for programming tools

Julia Liuson, president of Microsoft's developer division (DevDiv), will resign at the end of June, though she will continue in an advisory role.…

The core product is solid and priced fairly

I've spent over a decade telling anyone who'd listen that S3 is not a filesystem, which in retrospect was a really weird way to start some conversations. So when AWS launched S3 Files on Tuesday – which lets you mount an S3 bucket as an NFS share – I did what any reasonable person would do: I spun up an EC2 instance and started trying to break it.…

Attackers slipped into the process and redirected funds, leaving the company scrambling to recover the cash

UK-listed oil and gas outfit Zephyr Energy plc has admitted a cyber incident siphoned off roughly £700,000 after a single payment to a contractor was quietly redirected to an attacker-controlled account.…

A federal appeals court denied Anthropic's bid to temporarily block the Pentagon's blacklisting, meaning the company remains shut out of Defense Department contracts while the case continues, even though a separate court has allowed other federal agencies to keep using Claude for now. CNBC reports: "In our view, the equitable balance here cuts in favor of the government," the appeals court said in its decision. "On one side is a relatively contained risk of financial harm to a single private company. On the other side is judicial management of how, and through whom, the Department of War secures vital AI technology during an active military conflict. For that reason, we deny Anthropic's motion for a stay pending review on the merits." With the split decisions by the two courts, Anthropic is excluded from DOD contracts but is able to continue working with other government agencies while litigation plays out. Defense contractors will be prohibited from using Claude in their work with the agency, but they can use it for other cases. [...] In the ruling on Wednesday, the court acknowledged that Anthropic "will likely suffer some degree of irreparable harm absent a stay," but that the company's interests "seem primarily financial in nature." While the company claimed the DOD was standing in the way of its right to free speech, "Anthropic does not show that its speech has been chilled during the pendency of this litigation," the order said. Because of the harm Anthropic is likely to suffer, the appeals court said "substantial expedition is warranted." An Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement after the ruling that the company is "grateful the court recognized these issues need to be resolved quickly" and that it's "confident the courts will ultimately agree that these supply chain designations were unlawful." "While this case was necessary to protect Anthropic, our customers, and our partners, our focus remains on working productively with the government to ensure all Americans benefit from safe, reliable AI," Anthropic said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DSIT hiring directors general with packages reaching £260K plus pension

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) is recruiting three directors general to lead aspects of the UK government's digital work, all on pay in excess of the prime minister's salary.…

As if the backlog, the bugs, and the chatbot fixes weren't enough

Capita has limited the online functionality of its Civil Service Pensions Scheme (CSPS) member portal after confirming an "issue" briefly exposed the personal data of public sector workers.…

Home Office hopes tech will help cops target hotspots as ministers push to halve offenses

The British government is spending £15 million over the next three years to improve crime mapping in England and Wales, partly to allow more targeted policing of knife crime.…

Court of Appeal hearing in ValueLicensing dispute may shape parallel proceedings

The Microsoft and ValueLicensing legal tussle will enter an appeals phase this month, attracting the attention of a multibillion-pound class action against the Windows giant.…

Even fitness equipment is vulnerable to mischief makers these days

PWNED Welcome back to Pwned, the column where we share war stories from IT soldiers who shot themselves – or watched someone else shoot themselves – in the foot. Today's tale shows that even when you're setting up something as simple as fitness gear, there's no excuse for leaving security credentials lying around.…

The time is maybe

Quantum computing exists in a sort of superposition with regard to cryptography – it's both a pending threat and a technology of no immediate consequence for decryption.…