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AMD Zen hardware and Intel Coffee Lake affected

If you thought the world was done with side-channel CPU attacks, think again. ETH Zurich has identified yet another Spectre-based transient execution vulnerability that affects AMD Zen CPUs and Intel Coffee Lake processors by breaking virtualization boundaries.…

India's massive IT sector faces a lengthy period of uncertainty with customers delaying or re-negotiating contracts while the U.S. debates a proposed 25% tax on American firms using foreign outsourcing services, analysts and lawyers told Reuters. From a report: The sector is likely to be on the receiving end of a bill which, though unlikely to pass in its nascent form, will initiate a gradual shift in how big-name firms in the world's largest outsourcing market buy IT services, they said. Still, with U.S. firms having to pay the tax, those heavily reliant on overseas IT services are likely to push back, setting the stage for extensive lobbying and legal battles, analysts and lawyers said. India's $283 billion information technology sector has thrived for more than three decades exporting software services, with prominent clients including Apple, American Express, Cisco, Citigroup, FedEx and Home Depot. It has grown to make up over 7% of GDP. However, it has also drawn criticism in customer countries over job loss to lower-cost workers in India. Last week, U.S. Republican Senator Bernie Moreno introduced the HIRE Act, which proposes taxing companies that hire foreign workers over Americans, with the tax revenue used for U.S. workforce development.

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That won't even warm the plasma

America's Department of Energy (DOE) has earmarked $134 million in funding for two programs aimed at securing US leadership in emerging fusion technologies. The move comes amid renewed interest in nuclear power sparked by surging datacenter energy demands.…

Snapchat has been accused by a Danish research organisation of leaving an "overwhelming number" of drug dealers to openly operate on Snapchat, making it easy for children to buy substances including cocaine, opioids and MDMA. The Guardian: The social media platform has said it proactively uses technology to filter out profiles selling drugs. However, research by Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), a Danish research organisation that promotes responsible digital development, has found evidence of a failure to moderate drug-related language in usernames. It also accused Snapchat of failing to respond adequately to reports of profiles openly selling drugs. Researchers used profiles of 13-year-olds and found a multitude of people selling drugs on Snapchat under usernames featuring keywords such as "coke," "weed" and "molly." When researchers reported 40 of these profiles to Snapchat, the company removed only 10 of them. The other 30 reports were rejected, they said.

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Ron Wyden urges FTC to probe failure to secure Windows after attackers used Kerberoasting to cripple Ascension

Microsoft is back in the firing line after US Senator Ron Wyden accused Redmond of shipping "dangerous, insecure software" that helped cybercrooks cripple one of America's largest hospital networks.…

Graph database fave also punts for transactional workloads

Neo4j has introduced "property sharding" which, according to one analyst, will help overcome its earlier struggles with scalability, while also allowing transactional workloads on the same system.…

$50 standalone bots now bundled in $30 package

Microsoft is re-badging its Sales, Service, and Finance Copilots and slashing what it charges for them.…

Over 600 security boffins say planned surveillance crosses the line

Europe, long seen as a bastion of privacy and digital rights, will debate this week whether to enforce surveillance on citizens' devices.…

Major UK player cagey on specifics but latest attack follows string blamed on 'third party' suppliers

One of the UK's largest rail operators, LNER, is the latest organization to spill user data via a third-party data breach.…

Amazon is developing augmented-reality glasses with a full-color display, microphone, speakers, and camera, aiming for consumer release in 2026-27. It's also expected to release a separate version for delivery drivers, with a bulkier build and built-in navigation display to streamline package drop-offs. "Amazon initially plans on making 100,000 units of the glasses for delivery drivers, called 'Amelia' internally," reports The Verge, citing a report from The Information (paywalled).. "Reuters reported on the glasses last year, saying they would offer drivers 'turn-by-turn navigation on a small embedded screen.'"

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Academics and OSA stakeholders say watchdog needs to amend how controversial legislation is enforced

Industry experts expressed both concern and sympathy for Ofcom, the Brit regulator that is overseeing the Online Safety Act, as questions mount over the effectiveness of the controversial legislation.…

Battery powered now, fuel-cells tomorrow - all packed in a shipping box

Following a series of trials, defense biz BAE Systems says it is readying an autonomous military submarine for the end of next year.…

Not yet gone and not yet forgotten, but on their way

Microsoft has added a raft of web components to its list of deprecated features, including legacy Edge developer tools and hosted web apps.…

Admins can't stop checking their portals, survey finds

A new survey confirms what many IT pros already know: downtime doesn't exist, with dashboards and alerts intruding on their free time.…

Researchers in China have developed a "DNA cassette," a retro-styled plastic tape embedded with synthetic DNA strands that can store up to 36 petabytes of digital data -- enough to hold every song ever recorded. New Scientist reports: Xingyu Jiang at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Guangdong, China, and his colleagues created the cassette by printing synthetic DNA molecules on to a plastic tape. "We can design its sequence so that the order of the DNA bases (A, T, C, G) represents digital information, just like 0s and 1s in a computer," he says. This means it can store any type of digital file, whether text, image, audio or video. One problem with previous DNA storage techniques is the difficulty in accessing data, so the team then overlaid a series of barcodes on the tape to assist with retrieval. "This process is like finding a book in the library," says Jiang. "We first need to find the shelf corresponding to the book, then find the book on the corresponding shelf." The tape is also coated in what the researchers describe as "crystal armor" made of zeolitic imidazolate, which prevents the DNA bonds from breaking down. That means the cassette could store data for centuries without deteriorating. While a traditional cassette tape could boast around 12 songs on each side, 100 meters of the new DNA cassette tape can hold more than 3 billion pieces of music, at 10 megabytes a song. The total data storage capacity is 36 petabytes of data -- equivalent to 36,000 terabyte hard drives. The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.

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Rust coreutils, TPM encryption, and GNOME 49 line up for October debut

The Quokka is a small, furry, and perpetually smiling marsupial from Australia. It's very cute – and now it's freezing.…

CedarDB pushed to the limit in improbable gaming experiment

The world has moved on from making Doom run on increasingly ridiculous devices. Now it's all about porting it to the most inappropriate of languages. Cue DOOMQL, a version of the shooter written in pure SQL.…

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out the reasons why

NASA has barred Chinese nationals from accessing its premises and assets, even those who hold visas that permit them to reside in the USA.…

Ovoid-themed in-memory malware offers a menu for mayhem

‘EggStreme’ framework looks like the sort of thing Beijing would find handy in its ongoing territorial beefs Infosec outfit Bitdefender says it’s spotted a strain of in-memory malware that looks like the work of Chinese advanced persistent threat groups that wanted to achieve persistent access at a “military company” in the Philippines.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Global warming in the United States is amping up the country's sweet tooth, a new study found. When the temperature rises, Americans -- especially those with less money and education -- drink lots more sugary beverages and a bit more frozen desserts. That amounts to more than 100 million pounds of added sugar (358 million kilograms) consumed in the nation a year, compared to 15 years earlier, according to a team of researchers in the U.S. and United Kingdom. When temperatures go between 54 and 86 degrees (12 and 30 degrees Celsius), the amount of sugar the average American consumes goes up by about 0.4 grams per degree Fahrenheit (0.7 grams per degree Celsius) per day, based on researchers tracking of weather conditions and consumers' purchases. At 54 degrees, the amount of added sugar for the average American is a little more than 2 grams. At 86 degrees, it's more than 15 grams. Beyond that, appetites lessen and added sugar falls off, according to the study in Monday's Nature Climate Change. "Climate change is shaping what you eat and how you eat and that might have a bad effect on your health," said study co-author Duo Chan, a climate scientist at the University of Southampton. "People tend to take in more sweetened beverages as the temperature is getting higher and higher," Chan said. "Obviously under a warming climate that would cause you to drink more or take in more sugar. And that is going to be a severe problem when it comes to health." The findings have been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

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