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Atlas VPN informed customers on Monday that it will discontinue its services on April 24, citing technological demands, market competition, and escalating costs as key factors in the decision. The company said it will transfer its paid subscribers to its sister company, NordVPN, for the remainder of their subscription period to ensure uninterrupted VPN services.
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LLMs powering generative AI may be moving GPUs, but Huang and co already looking at next big opportunity
Comment For many, apps like ChatGPT, Copilot, Midjourney, or Gemini are generative AI.…
Apple has been hit with a flurry of new consumer lawsuits accusing the iPhone maker of monopolizing the smartphone market, piggybacking on a sweeping antitrust case lodged by the U.S. Justice Department and 15 states last week. From a report: At least three proposed class actions have been filed since Friday in California and New Jersey federal courts by iPhone owners who claim Apple inflated the cost of its products through anticompetitive conduct. The lawsuits, seeking to represent millions of consumers, mirror the Justice Department's claims that Apple violated U.S. antitrust law by suppressing technology for messaging apps, digital wallets and other items that would have increased competition in the market for smartphones.
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'Look at what we're accusing TikTok of, and then go look at Facebook and Google...'
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has criticized the US government's targeting of TikTok, saying it is hypocritical to single out one social media platform for tracking users and not apply the same rule to all.…
Boffins demonstrate Rowhammer memory meddling on AMD DDR4 hardware
ZenHammer would be the perfect name for a heavy metal band, but alas, it's an AMD-focused variant of the decade-old Rowhammer attack that compromises computers by flipping bits of memory.…
The U.K. government has blamed China for a 2021 cyberattack that compromised the personal information of millions of U.K. voters. From a report: In a statement to lawmakers in Parliament on Monday, U.K. deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden attributed the 2021 data breach at the Electoral Commission to hackers working for the Chinese government. Dowden told lawmakers that the U.K. government "will not hesitate to take swift and robust actions wherever the Chinese government threatens the United Kingdom's interests."
It's the first time the United Kingdom has attributed the breach since the cyberattack was first disclosed in 2023. The Electoral Commission, which maintains copies of the U.K. register of citizens eligible to vote, said at the time hackers took the names and addresses of an estimated 40 million U.K. citizens, including those who were registered to vote between 2014 and 2022 and overseas voters. The data breach began as early as 2021 but wasn't detected until a year later. In a statement Monday, the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said it is "highly likely" that the Chinese hackers accessed and exfiltrated emails and data from the electoral register during the hack.
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Systems have been pulled offline as a precaution
Exclusive The Communications Workers Union (CWU), which represents hundreds of thousands of employees in sectors across the UK economy including tech and telecoms, is currently working to mitigate a cyberattack.…
FrankOVD shares a report: Here's a paragraph from the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit against Apple in full: "In addition to degrading the quality of third-party messaging apps, Apple affirmatively undermines the quality of rival smartphones. For example, if an iPhone user messages a non-iPhone user in Apple Messages -- the default messaging app on an iPhone -- then the text appears to the iPhone user as a green bubble and incorporates limited functionality: the conversation is not encrypted, videos are pixelated and grainy, and users cannot edit messages or see typing indicators.
"This signals to users that rival smartphones are lower quality because the experience of messaging friends and family who do not own iPhones is worse -- even though Apple, not the rival smartphone, is the cause of that degraded user experience. Many non-iPhone users also experience social stigma, exclusion, and blame for 'breaking' chats where other participants own iPhones. This effect is particularly powerful for certain demographics, like teenagers -- where the iPhone's share is 85 percent, according to one survey. This social pressure reinforces switching costs and drives users to continue buying iPhones -- solidifying Apple's smartphone dominance not because Apple has made its smartphone better, but because it has made communicating with other smartphones worse."
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Users may have to upgrade twice to protect their browsers
Mozilla has swiftly patched a pair of critical Firefox zero-days after a researcher debuted them at a Vancouver cybersec competition.…
Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft developer, has shared the story behind the Format drive dialog box in Windows, which has remained unchanged for nearly three decades. According to Plummer, the dialog box was created as a temporary solution during the porting of code from Windows 95 to Windows NT, due to differences between the two operating systems. Plummer jotted down all the formatting options on a piece of paper and created a basic UI, intending it to be a placeholder until a more refined version could be developed. However, the intended UI improvement never materialized, and Plummer's temporary solution has persisted through numerous Windows versions, including the latest Windows 11.
Plummer also admitted that the 32GB limit on FAT volume size in Windows was an arbitrary decision he made at the time, which has since become a permanent constraint.
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For now, cryptographic work should be run on slower Icestorm cores
The GoFetch vulnerability found on Apple M-series and Intel Raptor Lake CPUs has been further unpacked by the researchers who first disclosed it.…
They were all planning on leaving anyway, company claims
The door plug on Boeing's C-suite has flown off, taking the CEO, board chair, and head of its commercial airplane division with it.…
European Commission says 12-month investigation could lead to fine of up to 10% of global revenue
The European Commission is opening its first official probes under the Digital Markets Act with a focus on curbing the power of tech titans Apple, Meta, and Alphabet via threats of heavy fines.…
It's just not economical for Chipzilla to be the factories' only customer these days
Intel is keen to get its Foundry Services strategy off the ground and draw in more customers. With this in mind, it's made a move to cultivate Elon Musk and finalized an agreement with Arm intended to make it easier for chip designers to get their products built.…
After declaring the end of CHIEF at least five times in as many years, HMRC hopes this June 2024 date will stick
The UK's tax collector has named the date for migrating from a 30-year-old customs IT system for the fifth time in as many years after planning its replacement for more than a decade.…
Boeing announced a major leadership overhaul Monday, with CEO Dave Calhoun set to step down at the end of 2024 amid mounting pressure from airlines and regulators over quality and manufacturing issues. Chairman Larry Kellner will also resign and depart the board at Boeing's annual meeting in May, the company said. He will be replaced as chair by Steve Mollenkopf, a Boeing director since 2020. Stan Deal, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, is leaving the company effective immediately. Stephanie Pope, who recently became Boeing's Chief Operating Officer after leading Boeing Global Services, will take over Deal's role.
The shakeup comes as the aerospace giant faces increasing scrutiny following a series of production flaws and a recent incident involving a nearly new Boeing 737 Max 9, where a door plug blew out minutes into an Alaska Airlines flight on Jan. 5. Airlines and regulators have been calling for significant changes at Boeing to address these issues and restore confidence in the company's products. The leadership changes appear to be a response to these growing concerns.
An excerpt from a letter the CEO wrote to employees, also on Monday: As you all know, the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 accident was a watershed moment for Boeing. We must continue to respond to this accident with humility and complete transparency. We also must inculcate a total commitment to safety and quality at every level of our company.
The eyes of the world are on us, and I know we will come through this moment a better company, building on all the learnings we accumulated as we worked together to rebuild Boeing over the last number of years.
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The CNCF is looking for a tenth anniversary logo
Logowatch Are you feeling creative? To celebrate ten years of Kubernetes, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is seeking a design for an anniversary logo. Perhaps just the letters A and I crudely taped onto a ship's wheel would do the job?…
In a state where housing is expensive to build, to rent, or to buy — and not especially energy efficient — can a big blue robot make a difference?
The Boston Globe reports on Reframe Systems, one of the companies "trying robots to make construction more efficient" — in this case, "working alongside humans in an assembly line to build small houses in a factory."
[Its cofounders] learned to get robots and humans to work together while at Amazon, which has built more than 750,000 bots in Massachusetts and deployed them to distribution centers around the world. Advising the company are Amy Villeneuve, former chief operating officer of that Amazon division, and Charly Mwangi, a veteran of the carmakers Nissan, Tesla, and Rivian...
Standing at one end of Reframe's factory, [cofounder Aaron] Small explained that the company's ambition is to build net-zero houses — houses that produce as much energy as they use — "twice as fast as traditional methods, twice as cheap, and with 10 times lower carbon" emissions. That means using large screws called helical piles to fix the house to the site, instead of a concrete foundation. (Concrete production generates large amounts of carbon dioxide.) The company buys recycled cellulose insulation to fill the walls. Solar panels go on the roof and triple-paned windows in the walls...
Reframe's "microfactory" can produce between 30 and 50 homes a year, [cofunder Vikas] Enti said. Eventually, the company aims to set up larger factories around the country, all within an hour's drive of big cities.
After a home is trucked to its final destination, "Electrical wires and plumbing are installed in both floors and walls as they're built," according to the article.
"Employees toting iPads can refer to digital construction drawings and get step-by-step instructions about tasks from cutting lumber to connecting pipes." One of the co-founders says, "We like to compare it to Lego instructions."
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Move could 'weaken' Brits' personal data rights when info is transferred outside Europe
Comment The UK government's proposed data protection law reform seeks to create a more business-friendly regime, though its implementation could further complicate the international flow of data between Britain and Europe, which potentially outweighs any benefits to business.…
The European Union has launched investigations into Apple, Meta and Google under its sweeping new digital-competition law, adding to the regulatory scrutiny large U.S. tech companies are facing worldwide. From a report: The suite of probes [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; official press release here] announced Monday are the first under the EU's Digital Markets Act law, which took effect earlier this month. They come less than a week after the Justice Department sued Apple over allegations it makes it difficult for competitors to integrate with the iPhone, ultimately raising prices for customers. Apple and Google will now face EU scrutiny of how they are complying with rules that say they must allow app developers to inform customers about alternative offers outside those companies' main app stores. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said it is concerned about constraints the tech companies place on developers' ability to freely communicate with users and promote their offers.
The bloc will also examine changes that Google made to how its search results appear in Europe. The new digital competition law says companies cannot give their own services preference over similar services that are offered by rivals. Another probe will look at how Apple complies with rules that say users should be able to easily remove software applications and change default settings on their iPhones, as well as how the company shows choice screens that offer alternative search engine and browser options.
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