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No prizes for guessing the victims

A Nebraska man will appear in court today to face charges related to allegations that he defrauded cloud service providers of more than $3.5 million in a long-running cryptojacking scheme.…

Need to send to more than 2,000 external recipients in 24 hours? Time to start looking for an alternative

For the first time, Microsoft will apply daily restrictions to Exchange Online in an effort to staunch the flow of spam from the service.…

Microsoft's Beijing-based research group published a new open source AI model on Tuesday, only to remove it from the internet hours later after the company realized that the model hadn't gone through adequate safety testing. From a report: The team that published the model, which is comprised of China-based researchers in Microsoft Research Asia, said in a tweet on Tuesday that they "accidentally missed" the safety testing step that Microsoft requires before models can be published. Microsoft's AI policies require that before any AI models can be published, they must be approved by the company's Deployment Safety Board, which tests whether the models can carry out harmful tasks such as creating violent or disturbing content, according to an employee familiar with the process. In a now-deleted blog post, the researchers behind the model, dubbed WizardLM-2, said that it could carry out tasks like generating text, suggesting code, translating between different languages, or solving some math problems.

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No breach responsible for employee contact info getting out, says T-Mo

T-Mobile US employees say they are being sent text messages that offer them cash to perform illegal SIM swaps for supposed criminals.…

Film data researcher Stepehen, writing on his blog: This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays. The most common source for adapted screenplays was real-life events, accounting for almost a fifth of movies made between 2000 and 2023. (Typically, in these cases, the filmmakers will have paid for the rights to a nonfiction book or two that covered those events, but we will classify that as 'based on real-life events' in this analysis.) Other sources include fictional books/articles (8.9%), previous movies (11.8%), stage productions (including plays, musicals, and dance performances) (1.5%), and TV/Web shows (0.9%). In the chart below, 'Other' includes myths, legends, poems, songs, games, toys, and more. How has this changed over the years? Forty years ago, about the same proportion of movies being made were original screenplays as they are today. That's quite surprising -- both because I assume that many people expected it to be lower in recent years, but also because little stays the same in the film industry over such a long period of time. But when we look at a time series by year, we can see that it hadn't plateaued. During the late 1990s and 2000s, original screenplays declined markedly and only rose again in the 2010s.

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Judge to hear software vendor's effort to dismiss discrimination case next month

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) says a claim against Workday should be allowed to continue, arguing the HR and finance software vendor may qualify as an employment agency because of the way its AI tool screens applicants.…

SonicSpike shares a report: The quest to return rock materials from Mars to Earth to see if they contain traces of past life is going to go through a major overhaul. The US space agency says the current mission design can't return the samples before 2040 on the existing funds and the more realistic $11bn needed to make it happen is not sustainable. Nasa is going to canvas for cheaper, faster "out of the box" ideas. It hopes to have a solution on the drawing board later in the year. Returning rock samples from Mars is regarded as the single most important priority in planetary exploration, and has been for decades. Just as the Moon rocks brought home by Apollo astronauts revolutionised our understanding of early Solar System history, so materials from the Red Planet are likely to recast our thinking on the possibilities for life beyond Earth.

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Who needs aircon when you have NASA to punch holes through your home?

NASA has confirmed that a piece of space junk that crashed through a Florida home in March was a fragment of a discarded ISS battery pallet.…

Social engineering patterns spotted across range of popular projects

Open source groups are warning the community about a wave of ongoing attacks targeting project maintainers similar to those that led to the recent attempted backdooring of a core Linux library.…

China's Baidu says its AI chatbot "Ernie Bot" has amassed more than 200 million users as it seeks to remain China's most popular ChatGPT-like chatbot amid increasingly fierce competition. From a report: The number of users has roughly doubled since the company's last update in December. The chatbot was released to the public eight months ago. Baidu CEO Robin Li also said Ernie Bot's API is being used 200 million times everyday, meaning the chatbot was requested by its user to conduct tasks that many times a day. The number of enterprise clients for the chatbot reached 85,000, Li said at a conference in Shenzhen.

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Can regulators keep up?

Microsoft has confirmed a $1.5 billion investment in G42, a United Arab Emirates (UAE) AI biz.…

Enhanced data density and speed upgrades, though challenges in endurance remain

Micron is now mass producing 232-layer QLC NAND, claiming it's the first memory manufacturer to break the 200-layer mark in QLC chips.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal prosecutors indicted a Nebraska man on charges he perpetrated a cryptojacking scheme that defrauded two cloud providers -- one based in Seattle and the other in Redmond, Washington -- out of $3.5 million. The indictment, filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York and unsealed on Monday, charges Charles O. Parks III -- 45 of Omaha, Nebraska -- with wire fraud, money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions in connection with the scheme. Parks has yet to enter a plea and is scheduled to make an initial appearance in federal court in Omaha on Tuesday. Parks was arrested last Friday. Prosecutors allege that Parks defrauded "two well-known providers of cloud computing services" of more than $3.5 million in computing resources to mine cryptocurrency. The indictment says the activity was in furtherance of a cryptojacking scheme, a term for crimes that generate digital coin through the acquisition of computing resources and electricity of others through fraud, hacking, or other illegal means. Details laid out in the indictment underscore the failed economics involved in the mining of most cryptocurrencies. The $3.5 million of computing resources yielded roughly $1 million worth of cryptocurrency. In the process, massive amounts of energy were consumed. [...] Prosecutors didn't say precisely how Parks was able to trick the providers into giving him elevated services, deferring unpaid payments, or failing to discover the allegedly fraudulent behavior. They also didn't identify either of the cloud providers by name. Based on the details, however, they are almost certainly Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. If convicted on all charges, Parks faces as much as 30 years in prison.

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First glimpse at attack financials reveals huge pain

UnitedHealth, parent company of ransomware-besieged Change Healthcare, says the total costs of tending to the February cyberattack for the first calendar quarter of 2024 currently stands at $872 million.…

Plans to plant $12B bitbarn where homegrown renewables hope once lived

US private equity investor Blackstone has plans for a £10 billion ($12.45 billion) hyperscale datacenter in northern England on a site formerly owned by battery startup Britishvolt.…

$62 million settlement plan challenged over payments to progressive nonprofits

Google's plan to pay $62 million to settle allegations that it tracked people even when their Location History setting was switched off may have to be renegotiated based on several objections.…

Consultancy tasked with helping local services get on board

The UK's health department has awarded global consultancy KPMG an £8.5 million ($10.5 million) contract to help implement the controversial Federated Data Platform (FDP) at a local level.…

YouTube has updated its policies to no longer allow "third-party apps to turn off ads." The Verge reports: This appears to target mobile ad blockers like AdGuard, which lets you open YouTube within the ad blocking app, where you'll get to view videos interruption-free. "We only allow third-party apps to use our API when they follow our API Services Terms of Service," YouTube says. "When we find an app that violates these terms, we will take appropriate action to protect our platform, creators, and viewers." To get around this, YouTube once again suggests signing up for the ad-free YouTube Premium.

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Starts racking MI300X systems - because you can actually buy them and they beat the H100 on many specs

Specialist cloud operators skilled at running hot and power-hungry GPUs and other AI infrastructure are emerging, and while some of these players like CoreWeave, Lambda, or Voltage Park — have built their clusters using tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, others are turning to AMD instead.…

If you wanna make money you've gotta spend money. And against Samsung it's gonna cost a lot

Analysis Three years after CEO Pat Gelsinger announced Intel would create a foundry business that took on contract manufacturing gigs, Chipzilla has committed to more than $185 billion in spending across new and existing fab, packaging, and test sites.…