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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Denver7: Maryland is poised to become the first state in the country to ban "surveillance pricing." The practice refers to companies using a shopper's personal data, such as browsing history, location, or purchasing behavior, to tailor prices to individual customers. The Protection From Predatory Pricing Act, passed this month and sent to the governor for a signature, would prohibit food retailers and third-party delivery services from using the practice. Violations would be treated as deceptive trade practices under state law, with potential fines and lawsuits. While Consumer Reports called the move "encouraging," it warned that the final version contains "loopholes" that don't fully protect consumers. Some of the exemptions noted in the report include "applying the ban only to the use of personal data to set higher prices without establishing a baseline or standard price; exempting pricing tied to loyalty or membership programs, even if prices are higher; and exempting pricing linked to subscriptions or subscription-based services."

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Change is glacial, but the direction is clear

It might look like a map of the London Underground designed by a madman, but Gartner's newly-completed DBMS Market Share Ranks: 2011-2025 has an important message. The change may be glacial, but (most of the) dominant database vendors are slowly losing their grip on the market.…

Plus: Court papers reveal nonprofit paid a ransom worth nearly $26.8 million

The third of three former ransomware negotiators accused of assisting the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang in extorting US businesses has pleaded guilty, months after his two co-workers did the same.…

One of two second stage engines misbehaved, administration must sign off report before flights resume

Blue Origin's New Glenn loss of a satellite has been classed as a "mishap" by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), triggering a mandatory investigation.…

An $899 CPU? In this economy?

Review Ever since AMD's cache-stacked Ryzen 7 5800X3D closed the gap with Intel in gaming, folks have wondered: if one V-Cache chiplet is good, surely two must be better. With the launch of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition (DE), we finally have our answer.…

CEO suspects silicon sidekick behind 'surprising velocity' breach - cyber crims shop stolen data for $2M

Vercel's CEO reckons the crooks behind its recent breach likely had a helping hand from AI, saying the attackers moved with "surprising velocity" and a deep understanding of the company's infrastructure.…

Mexican IT services firm admits it was hacked, but says client operations weren't affected

A Mexican IT infrastructure and digital transformation biz is on clean-up duty after a criminal posted screenshots of what they claimed was company video surveillance footage to a cybercrime forum.…

Amazon is expanding its Anthropic partnership with a deal to invest up to another $25 billion, while Anthropic commits to spending more than $100 billion on AWS infrastructure over the next decade to power Claude. "Anthropic's commitment to run its large language models on AWS Trainium for the next decade reflects the progress we've made together on custom silicon, as we continue delivering the technology and infrastructure our customers need to build with generative AI," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement. CNBC reports: Amazon's investment includes $5 billion into Anthropic now, with up to $20 billion in the future tied to "certain commercial milestones," according to a release. The initial investment is at Anthropic's latest valuation of $380 billion. Anthropic said in the release that it will bring nearly 1 gigawatt total of Trainium2 and Trainium3 capacity online by the end of the year. With all of the major hyperscalers competing to build out AI capacity as quickly as possible, Amazon said in February that it expects to shell out roughly $200 billion this year on capital expenditures, mostly on AI infrastructure.

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No facial recognition privacy intrusions either! Well, maybe a little

London's Metropolitan Police is trialing new retail technology to help curtail the city's pervasive shoplifting problem… and it doesn't rely on live facial recognition (LFR).…

90% of schools already compliant, but at least now there's paperwork

Ministers are moving to turn England's patchwork of school phone bans into law, after peers backed fresh changes to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill in a Monday vote.…

Spoiler: There's no magic value. Just a timer, some kernel calls, and too much coffee

Windows has always had a built-in portal to the very recent past: Task Manager's CPU usage meter.…

Fake emails already doing the rounds as ransomware crew boasts about what it allegedly stole

UK enterprise software consultancy The Adaptavist Group is investigating a security breach after an intruder logged in with stolen credentials, while a ransomware crew claims it grabbed far more than the company is currently admitting.…

Admins are tired of taking photos, so this enables secure on-site unattended enrolment

Japanese industrial giant Panasonic has created a new form of QR code it says will only work on designated devices and environments.…

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman posted an out-of-this-world iPhone video on Sunday, showing Earth disappear behind the Moon at 8x zoom. "I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view," said Wiseman, noting that this video is "uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom" and "quite comparable to the view of the human eye." The New York Times says the video marks the first time an "Earthset" has been captured on video. "We've seen our fair share of remarkable images and videos from NASA's Artemis II mission around the Moon. Some of those were even captured on iPhone," notes 9to5Mac. "But Reid Wiseman, astronaut and commander for the Artemis II mission, just posted a new video that might take the crown for the most impressive yet."

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And China is loving it

Iranian media is claiming that the US used backdoors and/or botnets to disable networking equipment during the current war, and Chinese state media is dining out on the allegations.…

A new email from Sony says that PlayStation will require players to verify their age later this year to keep using communication features like messages and voice chat. Insider-Gaming reports: The initiative comes from the goal of providing "safe, age-appropriate experiences for players and families while respecting their privacy" and providing "meaningful control over their gaming experiences." The age-verification process will be implemented globally, and players will need to verify their age to continue using PlayStation communication services, such as messages and voice chat. If the player opts not to verify their age, they can still use other services, such as games, trophies, and the store. Only the communication experience will be affected if you choose not to verify your age. PlayStation didn't provide a date for when players will need to begin the verification process.

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Dud contracts, proprietary designs, and zero-experience supplier make for quite the mess

The NASA Office of Inspector General, the aerospace agency’s auditor, fears that work on next-generation spacesuits won’t finish in time to use them for the planned Artemis III Moon landing mission in 2028.…

Remember what we promised when you subscribed for a year? Well, we've got a new deal that's better for us.

Microsoft's GitHub has stopped accepting new Copilot individual subscriptions while the code hosting biz figures out how it can meet its service commitments without breaking the bank.…

A lesson in how not to respond to vulnerability reports

Vibe-coding platform Lovable is pooh-poohing a researcher’s finding that anyone could open a free account on the service and read other users' sensitive info, including credentials, chat history, and source code. However, the company’s story keeps changing: First it attributed the publicly exposed info to "intentional behavior" and "unclear documentation," then threw bug-bounty service HackerOne under the bus.…

The struggles continue for Fermi America's 17 GW bit barn ambitions

It’s been a weekend filled with dizzying changes in the boardroom at datacenter wannabe Fermi America as it hopes eventually to expand its West Texas campus to about 17 gigawatts of behind-the-meter generation capacity.…